An Interview with C. Dale Young

Justin Bigos: I’d like to start by talking about beauty. I am currently taking a poetry workshop in which the teacher, on the first day of class, asked us: “Is beauty something you think about in your poems?” I was kind of struck by the question – as if a poet could possibly not think of beauty, not just in his or her own poems but in the poems of others. Carl Phillips has written in an essay, “The point of the poem is not to say anything about beauty, but to enact the vision of it” – “to see it.” So, the student now asks the teacher: Is beauty something you think about in your poems, in the poems of others?

C. Dale Young: Many have written about beauty, but I always return to Stephen Dobyns and his extraordinary book of essays Best Words, Best Order. In that collection, he has a phenomenal essay on the problem of beauty. In that essay, he quotes a passage by Dostoyevsky in which one finds the following:

"Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God setsus nothing but riddles. […] The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."

I return to that quote often because I don’t know exactly what beauty is, and I firmly believe one cannot know it without the juxtaposition of the ordinary. Someone once tried to convince me you could only see the beautiful if you had seen the grotesque, but I disagree. I believe to see beauty one must also see the ordinary out of the corner of one’s eye. So, in the drafting, the getting the poem down, I do not think of beauty. But in revision I do, and at that point I am also keenly aware that to have beauty one must also have the ordinary. If a poem is filled with nothing but the beautiful, it becomes a kind of grotesque. In the end, I strive not for beauty but for elegance, remembering that elegance arises from simplicity and not from the beautiful. Reliance on the beautiful, reliance on detail, gives rise not to elegance but to the baroque, something which if taken to the extreme is grotesque.

JB: I like your emphasis on the common, the ordinary, even the peripheral. It does seem that poets who have an aversion to “beauty” may think of it as necessarily precious. And in that way the beautiful becomes “sentimental” – another word poets tend to hate. I think of your poem “The Bridge,” which begins, “I love. Wouldn’t we all like to start/ a poem with ‘I love’? I would.” The poem moves from this playful ars-poetica opening to a love poem, and the poem ends on the image of the speaker and his beloved holding hands, and how they look together like the Golden Gate Bridge. The poem definitely flirts with sentimentality, and in its flirting it feels defiant – and so the ending is a kind of middle finger to those who would deny – well, the things we’re talking about: beauty, feeling, joy, which are found in common, everyday life. So: what the hell is going on? Seriously, where does all this doubting of our own emotions come from? Is it worth thinking about? Or should we just get our work done and not worry about it?

CDY: It is, I would argue, a good thing to doubt our emotions and how they are used in poems. If the poem arises wholly from a single emotion, the likelihood the poem will be flat increases significantly. “The Bridge” started because many years ago I noticed that there were parallel lines in the word “parallel.” I just loved that. When I was much younger I falsely believed that the love poem was in essence a dead form; I believed this out of a kind of laziness when I was a graduate student. What I realized with time is that the love poem isn’t dead but just incredibly difficult to pull off. I wanted to write a poem about the fact I love so many things. I wanted to be playful. In the end, I believe it is the playfulness that allows me to pull that poem off. If I had opened the poem with what comes at the end, the poem would have spiraled into utter sappiness. For every force there must be an opposing force. Poems are much like that basic idea in physics.

An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling

Justin Bigos: First, thank you for visiting UNT this January to read your poetry. As I was listening to you read, I had the sense that your poems might be typographically playful. And indeed, when I had your books in my hand, I saw that they are. Are you more attentive to the poem as human voice, or as aesthetic object on the page – or something in between or other?

Kristina Marie Darling: That's a great question. When I first started writing, I saw myself as a lyric poet. I definitely believed that there should be a connection between poetry and an authentic spoken voice. After reading the work of poets like C.D. Wright, Myung Mi Kim, and Kristy Bowen, I became interested in writing poems that allow multiple voices to coexist within the same narrative space. For me, the use of typography is useful for differentiating between the various speakers, found texts, and types of rhetoric that inhabit my poems. I do believe that poems should be musical. But I'm skepticalof the belief that poetry is synonymous with a spoken voice. For me, poetry's great appeal is in the potential for dialogue between found texts, and between different types of appropriated language. I've found that typography in my own poetry helps to facilitate this dialogue.

JB: Some of your poems "take liberties with" the letters of H.D., those written to Richard Aldington and to Freud during H.D.’s psychoanalysis. I don't get the sense many people read H.D. these days. Why should they – not just her letters but her poetry?

KMD: I definitely agree that H.D. isn't as widely read as some of her contemporaries. This is a mystery to me, since H.D.'s work reflects many of the aesthetic concerns that define contemporary poetry. I see her as the first truly modern poet. Works like Sea Garden, Helen in Egypt, and Trilogy privilege tangible details over abstraction, yet they allow these concrete images to serve as a point of entry to discussions of love, death, and history. This is definitely something that contemporary poets like Srikanth Reddy, Eric Baus, and Lisa Robertson strive for. H.D.'s work is also wonderful in its matching of form and content. Tribute to Freud, for instance, offers a lyric account of H.D.'s sessions with Freud. The work itself is driven by the same associative logic that one would observe in psychoanalysis. With that in mind, I think there's much to be learned from H.D.'s work in terms of craft. Her aesthetic concerns align beautifully with those of contemporary poets, myself included.

JB: I’m interested in your claim that H.D. is the “first truly modernist poet.” Aside from her use of concrete imagery to enter larger human and historical discussions, what would make her modernist – and the “first” modernist? (Ezra Pound is tapping his fingers, waiting for your answer . . .)