NA: You said in the first part of this interview series that you collaborate with your wife on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. And that you two have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I’d love to see a sample of what that exhibit looks like?
DD: In our most recent exhibit, which was funded by a grant from the Poetry Foundation, we gave poems to
local artists and had the artists paint, sculpt, or collage a response to the poetry. The poets featured were you, David Lehman, Richard Blanco, Eloisa Amezcua, Christine Kitano, Nicole Santalucia, H.L. Hix, William Heyen, María Isabel Álvarez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Christian Teresi, Leah Umansky, Nicole Santalucia, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Joe Weil, and a few others. My wife also made broadsides of the poem and artwork. We had local elementary school children respond to lines from the poems, as well, and we hung their crayoned responses in the children’s gallery, which is attached to the main gallery at Tioga Arts Council. Posted on the right is Richard Blanco’s “Cloud Anthem” from his most recent collection. The collage/painting was done by the artist, Andrea Kelleher.
NA: You collaborate with other poets, recently with Nicole Santalucia on a collection of Ashbery poems. And I heard that this book, Generations, inspired you to write a long poem in response to William Heyen. I wondered if you could talk a little about those projects and/or poems?
DD: Nicole and I have been collaborating on our Ashbery book for over two years now; the book is a series of epistolary prose poems addressed to John Ashbery. The poems began as letters to each other mediated by the figure of John Ashbery. I’m not sure what the final shape of this project will be, but I’ve enjoyed working on it with Nicole, who is such a dear friend and such a wonderful poet. I feel that I’m always learning from her, and she’s so funny, in her work and in real life. I’m so lucky to have her as a friend (and her wife Deanna Dorangrichia, who is an amazing artist). These friendships were given to me by poetry.
I also wrote a long poem titled MIDWHISTLE, written in stepped septasyllabic cinquains and addressed to Bill Heyen and to my son, Dante Jr., who was unborn when I wrote it. I think it’s safe to say this is the first long poem written simultaneously to an octogenarian and to a fetus.
I’ve always wanted to write a long poem. As an undergraduate I read and admired A.R. Ammons’s Garbage and Tape for the Turn of the Year, Williams’s Paterson, and Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. I’ve tried on many occasions to write my way into a book-length poem, but I could never find a way. Then, I read David Lehman’s Playlist (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) and reading that book started me thinking of the long poem again. Reading Bill Heyen’s long poem, To William Merwin (Mammoth Books, 2007), along with the impending birth of my son and my deep engagement with Heyen’s oeuvre, precipitated the initial outpouring, which became MIDWHISTLE.
Thanks to Sean Bishop and Ron Wallace, the University of Wisconsin Press picked up MIDWHISTLE and it will come out in spring 2023 as part of the Wisconsin Poetry Series. I’m excited to see this book come into the world along with the other collections that will be published in the series during 2022-2023: American Sex Tape by Jameka Williams, Shopping or The End of Time by Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Betsy Sholl’s As if a Song Could Save You, Joshua Burton’s Grace Engine, and Celeste Lipkes’s Radium Girl.
NA: A lot of poets have a favorite poem to read from their books. Maybe I should call it—their favorite read-aloud poem. Do you have one from this book? Or maybe just a poem to close with here? With a short opening commentary on how it came to be?
DD: I like this one. The title is a gentle half-parody of those long expository James Wright titles that I love (and that he modelled on Li Bai’s titles). The title does describe the genesis of the poem. I had been reading the Merwin translations and watching a television show about the arctic expedition and this poem came from there. The diastole and systole of this poem expresses everything I want to say, and keep trying to say, and haven’t quite figured out how to say, in all my poems.
Poem for My Two-Year-Old Daughter After Reading W.S. Merwin’s Translations of Musō Soseki and Spending a Few Hours Meditating on the Ill-Fated 1845 British Arctic Expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror
I’ve also made friends with wisteria
and the cattail light of morning. Come sleep
inside a bottled ship’s rigging. Be glad
you’re loved without longitude, forever.
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.
Nicole Santalucia is the author of Because I Did Not Die and Driving Yourself to Jail in July. She teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.
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