NA: Your latest book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, is part of a mini-anthology, featuring three books under one cover, called Generations, and published by Etruscan Press.
I thought we should start with the title poem, which I love.
DD: Thank you Nin and Amanda. I’m grateful to be able to have this conversation with you both. Generations also features The Nazi Patrol by William Heyen and How It Is that We by H.L. Hix. Here’s my title poem, which is the last poem in Lullaby with Incendiary Device:
Lullaby with Incendiary Device, Breached Hull, & Oil Slick
Before you were born, I dreamed you
into each cadence I would ever hear.
You board a paper boat and cross the sea.
One note of bluebird’s orison endures.
I love you so much the schooners inside
my heart keep crashing into each other
and capsizing, but, at least, they aren’t
all sunk yet, and no sailors have drowned
so far. What I mean by this is simple:
stay close always. Teach me to crayon fire.
Better yet, teach me the crazy hairstyles
of fire burning on the water’s surface,
my dear little one. Teach me what the fire
looks like from the underside of a wave.
AR: Many poems in Lullaby with Incendiary Device are about your children. Did becoming a parent change your poetry? If so, how?
DD: I have a four-year-old daughter (Luciana, who we call “Chi Chi”) and a seven-month-old son (Dante Jr.). Lullaby was written in the first two years of my daughter’s life. It’s really her book.
Becoming a father changed me and changed my life in innumerable subtle and immense ways; inevitably, then, parenthood changed my poetry. Parenthood, like poetry, reorients, intensifies, and recalibrates one’s attention. Parenthood turns you toward another, in much the same way that poetry does, or ideally, should. For me, poetry has always involved an interiority turned to face the world, an act of opening up, which involves a shedding of ego (breaking the mind forged manacles of Blake’s Urizen, echoing E.M. Forster’s injunction: “Only Connect”). Poetry and parenthood both involve what Seamus Heaney called a kind of “earned communion.” Both involve attention directed outward. There’s the shared duende of poetry and parenthood too: the knowledge of our own mortality in every diaper change and volta and skinned knee and spondee and snuggle and heroic couplet rocking you from blue hour to blue hour.
On a more practical level, parenthood changed the way my life was organized. My life now revolves around the schedules, needs, and wants of our little ones. I’ve had to dial back some of the poetry-related things I love doing like writing book reviews, but I still find time to read and to write and to engage with other poets living and dead.
My daughter and I have begun writing poetry together and my wife and I read the children poetry in addition to books like The Runaway Bunny and The Giving Tree and Dragons Love Tacos. My wife and I also collaborate on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. We have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I run a reading series. We are developing community workshops and we’re working on a poetry trail (a series of signposts with poetry displayed on them throughout the county). My children are a part of all these endeavors from planning stages to execution; they’ve both attended many local poetry-related events since the time they were in utero.
For me, the goal is that poetry be a constant part of my daily, ordinary, unromantic, middle class, suburban life, and that that life be a constant part of my poetry. The older I get, the less difference I feel between the poems I read and reread and memorize and dwell in, and my actual, seemingly boring, quotidian life.
Also, on a practical level, parenthood gave me a new set of experiences to write about. You don’t really know what fatherhood is until you live it yourself, what it’s like to be in the room when your child is born, what you feel when you hold your son or daughter for the first time, what it’s like to see them take their first steps, how they acquire language and relate to the world, what it’s like to be sleep-deprived and wakened in the middle of the night to clean up vomit off a beanbag chair and yet to feel happy about it, what it’s like to live daily in close proximity to the mind of a toddler. These are such intense, piquant, inestimably valuable experiences. And these experiences connect you, more deeply, to the great round of the human condition as it has unfolded for millennia.
Lastly, I’ve come to see my writing as a bequest for my children. I hope that my poetry means something to them when they grow up: that they have this series of artifacts from my time on earth, that they might see my work as a chronicle of the joys, pains, enthusiasms, struggles, desires, and perplexities of a lifetime. Ultimately, I pray that having access to these records of my interior life will help them through their own difficulties. If nothing else, I hope they see repeated over and over and over again, in every line, how much I love them and their mother, and how grateful I am for this life.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.
Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.
Nin Andrews is harvesting the winter lettuce in her garden today.
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