NA: Your recent book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, is part of a triptych, or one of three books under one cover. How do you like being published alongside Harvey Hix and William Heyen?
DD: I love it. Etruscan Press does such high-quality publishing work. Their books are beautifully made and thoughtfully chosen. The support of Phil Brady and Bob Mooney has meant more to me than I can properly articulate. The dedicated staff at the press are paragons of professionalism, especially Pamela Turchin and Bill Schneider, who organize and run much of the daily operations.
It’s an honor to have my book joined to the books of Harvey Hix and William Heyen. I hope that more publishers follow this tripartite publishing model. Heyen and Hix are poets I deeply admire, both for their bodies of work and for how they have constructed their lives in poetry. Both men embody a poetic stance I aspire to emulate: engaged, attentive, protean, ambitious, empathetic, and endlessly curious.
Harvey’s book How It Is that We continues his interrogation and deconstruction of the sonnet form, while nimbly moving among the detritus of 21st century discourses, texts, and personae. Reading it is like looking at starlight through a field of orbiting wreckage. I feel adrift and then suddenly I’m jolted into a new way of seeing.
Bill Heyen’s The Nazi Patrol continues his project of bearing witness to the Shoah through the poison orchards of the present. Here, he employs his single-line couplets to great effect. There’s something so compulsively readable in this collection, a raw velocity that feels like a kind of falling.
Harvey and Bill have written enough for five or six lifetimes between the two of them. The amazing thing to me about the prodigious output of both men is the exceedingly high quality of the work.
If you are reading this conversation and you haven’t read Hix, I’d suggest my favorite books by him: Rain Inscription (Etuscan Press, 2017) and Perfect Hell (Gibbs Smith, 1996). I’d also suggest his remarkable translation of the Gospels and Christian apocrypha, The Gospel according to H.L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020).
I’d recommend Heyen’s Shoah Train (Etruscan Press, 2003) and The Cabin: Journal 1968-1984 (H_NGM_N BKS, 2012). Heyen’s journals are an incredible document. I think Phil Brady described them as the work of a 20th century Samuel Pepys. In one entry, Heyen will be having a martini with Anne Sexton. In the next, he’ll be wondering if the garbagemen took his golfclubs. He chronicles all the important events of his family life, and of his life in poetry, against the backdrop of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and on and on.
AR: I recently listened to your conversation with Dr. Philip Brady about the collaborative project Sign and Breath. You read an incredible poem, “My Favorite Things,” which you had just written the day before. It made me curious to know where you find your inspiration? Do you strike proverbial gold with most of the poems you write?
DD: I find inspiration from my daily life, from my family, from my friends, from my memories, from things that I see when I’m walking the dog, from my job, from music, from movies and television, from art, and, most of all, from my reading life.
I’ve spent many years writing and reading poetry daily. Now, I write now when the mood strikes me and when circumstances permit. Like most poets, I have left years and years and thousands and thousands of bad poems in my wake. I think of all the marble composition notebooks, floppy disks, and old laptops full of my embarrassingly bad poems gone to rest in some landfill somewhere. I am grateful for all those years of woodshedding that brought me to where I am today. Still, I go through periods where nothing that I write works out the way I’d hoped, but I never feel frustrated. Writing is always a joy and a pleasure and a privilege that I don’t take for granted. I am ambitious with my poetry. I want to write great poetry, but for me it’s not so much about striking gold. It’s more about living a life of poetry. At the end of the preface for Generations, Phil Brady quotes a letter from Harvey Hix that reads: “To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense: live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry.” To live by poetry. That’s all I want.
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 grew up in a cardboard box, painted red and white to look like a typical brick house in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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