An Interview with Dante Di Stefano (by Nin Andrews)

 

As you might have guessed from my recent blog posts, I have been thinking a lot about the nature of truth, specifically autobiographical truth, in poetry. After all, we seem to be in era where everyone is questioning the nature of truth in every kind of writing.  As I mentioned in my interview with January Gill O’Neil, I had a poetry professor once who hated what he called “dishonesty in poetry.” He hated it when poets used the first person, and then described illnesses they never had or divorces they never went through or . . . who knows, maybe their own funerals. So I wanted to ask several poets how they navigate this question. A fan of the works of Dante Di Stefano, I thought I’d ask him a few questions. (Let me add that I love asking Dante anything, even the most inane questions because he always has such brilliant answers. I'm thinking of starting a column with the title, Just Ask Dante.)

NA: I love your poem in this year’s Best American Poetry, and I think it speaks to the essence of what made you want to be a poet. Or maybe it is simply stating that you already were, at seventeen, in essence, a poet.  (Of course, by saying that I am admitting that I am reading the poem as truth.) But reading it, I would not imagine that you set out to be an autobiographical or confessional poet? 

 

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished, and I wanted
only to love in that insane, tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
of the moon will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

 

And let me add, before you answer the question, that this poem as well as the others in this interview is from your forthcoming book, Ill Angels, that will be published by Etruscan Press next summer. I am so looking forward to owning that book! 

DDS: Thanks for your kind words, Nin. No, I didn’t set out to be a poet at all, of any kind. I’ve always loved reading and writing, but in high school I read mostly novels, and I kept a daily journal that mostly consisted of reactions to the books I was reading, quotes from those books, lists of new words I’d discovered, and philosophical statements (that I’m sure would make me cringe if I read them today). “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” begins with an autobiographical detail; it’s true that I read Dostoyevsky’s four big novels when I was seventeen. The poem attempts to recreate the frenetically pitched set of emotions that one only experiences either in the pages of a Russian novel or in the throes of adolescence. None of the images and phrases are drawn directly from Dostoyevsky. Rather, I try to evoke what Milan Kundera called “the magical charm of atmospheres”: recalling what it felt like to lie alone in my twin bed at night pondering the fate of Dmitri Karamazov, dreaming of a girl I liked in my homeroom. “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” is an attempt to capture those lost atmospheres from a novelistic or cinematic vantage point.

NA: I admire your poems about your father’s illness and death. One of these poems is called, “A Defense of Confessional Poetry.” Are you a defender of confessional poetry? Do you consider these poems to be confessional?

DDS: The poems about the illness and death of my father are deeply autobiographical. Most, if not all, of the details in these poems are true to the events as I recall them. Whenever I write about someone I know I tend not to embellish. Of course, remembering is an inherently slippery proposition, but I try to remain moored to the truth of my recollection. Sometimes, I feel like this fidelity to “truth” is a failure of imagination on my part. However, it would feel like a betrayal if I invented additional details about the day my father died, if I changed a second of my daughter’s birth, if I altered my wife’s personality, simply in service to a poem. In this sense, I can understand the objections of your college poetry professor.

The title “A Defense of Confessional Poetry” was a bit tongue in cheek, but in the poem, I was also trying to emphasize the transformational and restorative aspects of reconciling, or attempting to reconcile, the death of my father with my complicated feelings toward him.

I’m not a defender of confessional poetry (or of any poetry for that matter). I deeply admire the first-generation Confessional poets (none of whom, except for Sexton, approved of the label “Confessional”). These poets (Berryman, Snodgrass, Lowell, Plath, Sexton) provided a radical rejoinder to the orthodoxies of high Modernism and New Criticism, while opening thematic space for subsequent generations of poets to write about virtually anything. It should be noted that Confessional poetry comes to prominence along with the Beat Generation and the New York School at the height of the Cold War. These schools of poetry overlap with, and bleed into, the civil rights movement, the counter-culture, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement, all of which signaled fundamental changes in American society. In these movements, speaking personally became a crucial form of intervention in the public sphere and an overt political act. The Black Arts Movement is also a part of this helix.

From the time of its coinage to present day, the term “confessional,” as applied to poetry, has proven problematic. M.L. Rosenthal’s initial formulation of the confessional mode of writing (in his review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies) posits confessional poetry as a kind of “soul’s therapy.” (“Soul’s therapy” sounds downright ridiculous in 2018.) Confessional poetry since Rosenthal’s appraisal of Life Studies, although variously defined, remains contingent upon the linkages between personal revelation, private guilt, and public authenticity. 

Today, in the world of reality television, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the boundaries of the personal and the private have blurred. The forms of confession practiced across the spectrum of contemporary media are staged and superficial, contingent upon spectacle, less concerned with discovering truths than they are with generating celebrity. Confessions (and scandals) may abound in social media today, but little retains the power to shock or to foment meaningful political change. It’s undoubted that the autobiographical lyric and the shadow of the confessional mode continue to dominate the mainstream of contemporary American poetry. However, there’s so much reality-clutter in our culture, so many ways that poets (and non-poets alike) shape and pedal virtual selves, that the lyrical gesture toward autobiography and confession loses its dynamism against the backdrop of so many proliferating identities and revelations. It seems like identity and authenticity are more contested from more perspectives than ever before.

I’m somewhat suspicious of the overreliance on autobiographical detail in my own poetry because it opens the door to the corrosiveness of narcissism, sentimentality, and nostalgia.  I’m constantly at war with these things, and with my own inexhaustible naivete. At the same time, I don’t generally confess things that are shameful in my poetry, although I recognize the power in that gesture. I don’t want to put all my business in the street. Many of my poems are persona poems, or poems about music and language. I strive to be protean, to speak in tongues; I’d like to get to the point where I could have access to the imagination in the manner of William Blake, Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson (Not to be as great as any one of them, but to write one or two poems that approaches “The Proverbs of Hell” or “Juilate Agno” or “The Windhover” or “I taste a liquor never brewed”).

NA: In your poem, “Bronx Pyramid,” you open, “Sometimes you might be tempted to invent/a memory  . . .” and later you write, “I have come to know that I am not I/and you are not you in the music; . . .”

I love this poem, and I wanted to know if you could elaborate on the sentiments expressed in it.

 

The Bronx Pyramid
after Carlos Henriquez

Sometimes you might be tempted to invent
a memory from a Brook Avenue,
a curandera’s chanting resurrects,
a stillborn third son, brujo’s serpent tongue,
a trumpet blown over the arco of
ordinary seconds. Now, I hear time
cajole a rhythm from the embalmed worm
of reverie hidden in my own heart.
I have come to know that I am not I
and you are never you in the music;
here, where musician and audience meet,
we remain thirsty for the what that is
and is and hangs there like a mother’s name,
carving infinite care from the silence.

 

DDS: “The Bronx Pyramid” is an attempt to write from inside the music of Jazz bassist Carlos Henriquez. Henriquez is one of my favorite contemporary musicians and this poem tries to articulate what it feels like to dwell in the notes of his music. It occurs to me that we never question how autobiographical a Coltrane number is, and yet if you listen to A Love Supreme you come away with the sense that this music has laid bare a life before you. In great music, there is an intimacy and a vulnerability we are invited to share in as listeners. This holds true for other kinds of music too; it doesn’t matter if Bob Dylan lived on desolation row or if Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. A poem can be encoded with truth in the same way as a pop song or as a jazz number. What I think I come to understand in “The Bronx Pyramid” is that the music of Jazz and poetry (and Rock and Soul and on and on) begins with the dissolution of the self. One of the greatest joys I know is to be in the midst of composing a poem, or saying a poem, free from the strictures of self-definition, charged with negative capability, awash in what Galway Kinnell called “saying in its own music what matters most.”

NA: Also, in your poem, “Stump Speech,” you begin:

You undress in poetry, but in prose
you redress. You grow old in prose, lose teeth,
forget the face of your brother, but call
to your dead and dying in poetry.

For you, poetry is reaching for a different kind of truth than prose?  

DDS: I believe poetry has a different way of embodying truths than prose does. Quoting Milan Kundera again, “prose: the word signifies not only nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life.” For me, prose embodies the incremental, the calendric, the historic, the national, the transnational, and the immediate; of course, poetry has something to do with those things too, but poetry thresholds itself between restraint and effusion. It has more to do with the mythic, the atemporal, the visionary, the legislation of unacknowledged worlds (to paraphrase Oppen); of course, prose can tread that ground as well, but I don’t think in quite the same way as poetry does. Also, the distinctions between poetry and prose have collapsed quite a bit, under, among other things, the weight of what Christian Wiman called “the train wreck of broken-prose confessionalism.” I’m not as pessimistic about broken-prose confessionalism as Wiman is, and I haven’t quite articulated all the differences I intuit between great poetry and great prose, but I sense there are clear distinctions. Part of why I write poetry is to clarify those distinctions, and to come closer to understanding what poetry is.

 NA: In your poem, “For My Creative Writing Students,” you have these lines:

“The need to say what you can’t say unspools/ itself from your mouths and hymnals a hope/as blue and speckled as a robin’s egg.” Do you think of poetry as a way to say what can’t be said? 

DDS: I believe there are truths conveyed in poetry that go beyond the limits of language, what Frost called “the sound of sense,” what Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” I don’t think poems have so much to do with intention; poems are a kind of throbbing through words that accrues to music, what Stevens meant by “the dove in the belly.”

NA: I love that. Honestly, I would love to keep asking you questions just to read your responses. But I will stop for now. I thought maybe we could close with "Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering."

 

Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering
 

Because all the animals are kings and queens,
I wait for the rain to paint me; I long
to dream the butterfly dreaming me while
the blood lotuses into test tube,
pillow cherry blossoms the lolling head,
and all over the world the living still
go on living despite the needle’s truth,
stitching saline into this purple vein,
as a hawk is painted onto a bough
and the window beads itself up with rain.

The great wave continues to crash against
the clear sky, peasants fly kites from the roofs
that appear higher than Mount Fuji’s snow,
the fisherman’s wife fucks an octopus
or two, and the paddies remain tended
even when the south wind blows your hat off.

We, in our frail bodies, are woodcut, sketched
on silk, silkworms ourselves, ideograms
for dying, riders galloping a ridge
toward a mountain we will never reach.

There is no way to paint the swan in you,
or the heron taking wing, the village,
its terrible stillness before the fire.

For now, you have only the orderly
joking with the phlebotomist, asking
her to draw your blood in a bikini
next time; this is your temple, your tea house,
your watermill frozen in its churning,
a wheel of rivulets like braided hair,
or like the sutures in your throat and chest.

And the hospital might trick you into
believing this pain might make you holy,
but you are already holy, the stooped
millworker with a turtle on a string,
the surface of a lake without ripples,
the portly monk laughing in his Saki,
the lumberjacks sawing planks in heaven,
the sound of traffic on 68th Street,
the sill cleaving flight, a regent of air.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Along with María Isabel Àlvarez, he is the co-editor of the anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). 

 

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

Good column. "Just Ask Dante" is an inspired idea.

[Robert Pincus]

Question, What is the name of the Chagall Litho/Painting on the book cover of Ill Angels? A reply would be most appreciated