Dorianne Laux's fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of Awake; What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award; and Smoke. Her fifth collection, The Book of Men, will be published by W.W. Norton in February, 2011.

Published Date: July 13, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This interview originally occurred at the 2011 AWP Annual Conference in Washington DC. The recording features Brian Brodeur and Dorianne Laux.

Brian Brodeur:

Hello and welcome to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs podcast. I'm Brian Brodeur and I'm here at the 2011 AWP Conference in Washington DC, with poet Dorianne Laux. Dorianne Laux's fifth poetry collection, The Book of Men was just published this month by Norton. Her previous collections are Facts about the Moon, which received the Oregon Book Award and was shortlisted for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Awake; What We Carry, which was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award; and Smoke. Co-author of the Poet's Companion, A Guide to the Pleasure of Writing Poetry. She's the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She moved to Raleigh in 2008 where she teaches poetry in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. Dorianne Laux, welcome.

Dorianne Laux:

Thank you, Brian. So great to meet you.

Brian Brodeur:

Oh, great. Yeah, finally. Would you mind reading a poem for us?

Dorianne Laux:

I'd love to. This is called Bakersfield, 1969.

I used to visit a boy in Bakersfield, hitchhiked to the San Diego terminal and ride the bus for hours through the sun blasted San Fernando Valley, just to sit on his fold down bed in a trailer parked in the side yard of his parents' house, drinking southern comfort from a plastic cup. His brother was a sessions man for Taj Mahal and he played guitar, too, picked at it like a scab. Once his mother knocked on the tin door to ask us in for dinner, she watched me from the sides of her eyes while I ate. When I offered to wash the dishes, she told me she wouldn't stand her son being taken advantage of. I said I had no intention of taking anything and set the last dish carefully in the rack.

He was a bit slow, like he'd been hit hard on the back of the head, but nothing dramatic. We didn't talk much anyway, just drank and smoked and fucked and slept through the ferocious heat. I found a photograph he took of me getting back on the bus or maybe stepping off into his arms. I'm wearing jeans with studs punched along the cuffs, a T-shirt with stars on the sleeves, a pair of stolen bowling shoes and a purse I made while I was in the loony bin, wobbly X's embroidered on burlap with gaudy orange yarn. I don't remember how we met. When I look at this picture, I think I might not even remember this boy if he hadn't taken it and given it to me, written his name under mine on the back. I stopped seeing him after that thing with his mother. I didn't know I didn't know anything yet. I liked him. That's what I remember. That, and the I-don't-know-what degree heat that rubbed up against the trailer's metal sides, steamed in through the cracks between the door and porthole windows, pressed down on us from the ceiling and seeped through the floor, crushing us into the damp sheets.

How we endured it, sweat streaming down our naked bodies, the air sucked from our lungs as we slept. Last week I read an interview with Taj Mahal and he said if you ain't scared, you ain't right. Back then I was scared most of the time. But I acted tough, like I knew every street. What I liked about him was that he wasn't acting. Even his sweat tasted sweet.

Brian Brodeur:

Great. Thank you very much. Many of your poems seem to be based, at least partly on autobiographical material. Is Bakersfield based on a true story?

Dorianne Laux:

It is indeed.

Brian Brodeur:

Wow. I love the kind of retrospective, I used to be this way, sort of view of this woman who used to be you. Is that how you would view that poem, as kind of this almost other character who you used to be?

Dorianne Laux:

Absolutely. I hardly recognize her, and I think that happens with us when we do go through old photographs and we look and we think, who was that girl? Who was that young girl who thought she was so tough? And when you look back on it, you realize how really scared she was but wouldn't admit that to herself. In that way, it is almost like writing fiction, and that poem does have that fictional quality. It sounds like it is a story, and it is of course, but it has that fictional quality and I think that's because I really am writing about someone else.

Brian Brodeur:

When that poem started, did you start writing about the boy, or did you start writing about, I don't know, that particular time and then discovered-

Dorianne Laux:

No, I started writing about that. I had seen that picture and I started out, just as the poem begins, 'I used to visit a boy in Bakersfield.' I just started telling the story to myself, and once it got going, it really pretty much had a life of its own. It's one of those poems, there are very few that happen like that. Facts About the Moon is another poem that just kind of came out. I've made some changes here and there, but both of these poems just sort of spilled out. All the poems in between them did not, and there are about 200 of those.

Brian Brodeur:

Some duds, I'm sure, and some gems.

Dorianne Laux:

Absolutely, yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Could you talk about either how you or how one goes about making art out of the autobiographical? Certainly you have the advantage of having this retrospective view of yourself, this other woman who you were many years back, but it seems to me very difficult to make something good or decent or even lasting out of the autobiographical. But you have many poems that at least seem autobiographical, and that are very successful.

Dorianne Laux:

If I knew the answer to that question! I think there's this real timidity about the narrative and about the autobiographical even more so, and that is in me, too. I have to fight it. I have to say, "Your life is important. It's okay. You can write about this boy, you can write about your relationship with him and his mother. If you trust it, it will mean something beyond itself because you were inspired to reconstruct that experience for a reason." And so if you're lucky and if you work hard at it, you can find those little spots of time, those little moments that come up out of your life and become little lyric moments that represent either... Obviously somebody else hasn't had this exact experience, but hopefully it stands for a kind of experience that we've all had.

Brian Brodeur:

Right. So do you think a poet's fidelity should always be to the poem rather than the facts of what actually happened?

Dorianne Laux:

Never. I have no marriage to the facts at all. There are many facts in that poem that are absolutely true, one of which is the purse. I had the purse and it was butt ugly.

Brian Brodeur:

Bowling shoes. Bowling shoes, is that-

Dorianne Laux:

The bowling shoes I stole and I was wearing them. I mean, the way I was dressed is, because I was working from a photograph, so all of that is true. I'm not sure that the situation with his mother actually happened. So I'll tell you that. I was writing the poem, it came up. I don't know if it happened or not. I don't have a memory of it in my body. In the poem's body I do. So who's to say which one is telling the truth? I have no idea, but I know that it works perfectly for the poem. If I had to invent her for the poem, it was because the poem needed to have a third, it needed to have that third partner in crime.

Brian Brodeur:

It seems like there's always more tension in triangles rather than-

Dorianne Laux:

Threes. I tell my students that all the time. Threes are very... I mean, think about pyramids, they're a very strong shape.

Brian Brodeur:

That's right. And it is a kind of a strange love triangle as well. Yeah, interesting.

Dorianne Laux:

And kind of beautiful. I mean, she really is protective of her son in a way that years later I recognize, but as a young girl, I would never recognize.

Brian Brodeur:

Of course.

Dorianne Laux:

And that tension between mother and daughter is even there, that kind of echo tension. That is the most startling thing about the poem, and yet it's probably the least true thing in the poem. So there you go.

Brian Brodeur:

It's interesting how that sometimes works out that way. So you just came out with a new book this month. Do you view all of your books as separate projects or do you view your work as one poem or linking projects, or do you have any thoughts about that?

Dorianne Laux:

Yeah, I just don't approach things that way. I write poems and then I get so many of them that it's unwieldy. It's like I cannot put one more poem in this file. I can't bring one more poem to a reading in this batch because it's getting too heavy. And then it's time for another book. Then I have to look at it and think, well, what holds this together? Generally these days I just give it to my husband.

Brian Brodeur:

You deal with this mess!

Dorianne Laux:

You deal with this because I cannot. So I never really think in terms of project. Having said that, for the first time I'm thinking of doing a project. Right now. I have another book already, good hefty sized manuscript, which I'm happy to walk around with for a couple of years to see how it all falls out. But I do recognize that I keep writing these poems about the musicians that I grew up with, rock and roll. I have a poem about Cher, Dolly Parton, Mick Jagger, The Beatles-

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:11:10] in the new book, which is great.

Dorianne Laux:

Yes, they're spotted.

Brian Brodeur:

Don't Die.

Dorianne Laux:

Don't Die, Mick. Please! That's all we ask of you.

Brian Brodeur:

Live forever. Exactly. It's perfect.

Dorianne Laux:

Well, it looks like Keith will. That guy's not going anywhere. So that happened rather organically. I mean, just every once in a while I'd come out with one of these poems and then I started thinking about it. I thought, I love writing about this. Why don't I just do a whole book and do 40 poems and call it Top 40 and have them all? And it would be kind of a new and selected, right. All poems I've written in the past about music and musicians and songs. So I just finished one called Listening to Paul Simon. I have another one called Music, My Rampart, which is a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, and it's about James Taylor and the Mamas and the Papas. So I tried to write one about Tom Waits last night, did not work out, did not. But I'm going to keep pushing it and see if I can get one about Tom Waits. But I've made a list now, these are all the people I'd like to write about. That's as close to a project as I've ever gotten.

Brian Brodeur:

So it's sort of take things one poem at a time, more or less, and then at the end, you have this batch of poems and you think, okay, you go back through it. And so as you are thinking about putting a manuscript together with this batch, do you go through and say, "Okay, well this is a really strong poem, this is a really strong poem." Then how do you approach that assemblage process?

Dorianne Laux:

You throw out the ones that aren't so strong. I've worked a long time to get to a point like this, which is a really comfortable point to be at for a poet, where I have a whole batch of new poems that I'm feeling pretty good about. Plus this kind of little project where I'm writing new poems to add to this other little batch that hopefully I'll feel good about. So I'm not worried about a damn thing. I'm just having fun. I'm just saying, "I am just going to have fun and write these poems because I like writing these poems." And how it falls out in terms of a book, generally I just get the poems together, start, like you say, pulling out bad ones, but also seeing what the linkages are. But they're organic linkages. They're already there. I wasn't thinking of them. It's just now that I put it out on the floor like a puzzle, what piece fits where?

My husband's very good at that too. He has a great vision for how things could fit together. So it's hit-and-miss. I find often what happens is that I'll write a book, I'll find that thread. I'll give the book a title like Facts About the Moon, and I'll go, "Great, this is great." And then I move on to the next book and I find myself still writing moon poems, and I'm like, well, wait a minute. If I had just waited, I could have had more moon poems in my moon book.

And then I get The Book of Men. That's the thing, the thread there. And now I'm writing these poems, other poems about men. I think, that could have gone in The Book of Men. So in that respect, it is one long project. Things overlap, and I probably am not writing appreciably different poems than I began writing, because the same things obsessed me that have always obsessed me.

Brian Brodeur:

You mentioned music earlier, so besides maybe subject matter, how has music affected your work? For instance, do you listen to music when you write?

Dorianne Laux:

I do not listen to music when I write, and I was just asked that question on this notorious, I think it's called Blog, and they asked me to write a little piece on music and poetry, which I think the linkages between those two. I always tell my young poets, go hang out with the musicians, don't hang out with other poets. Go find some musicians. Music has been hugely influential in my poetic life. When I was growing up, I was very lucky to grow up in an era where the music and the musicians were poets, and really that's what made me want to write poetry.

Brian Brodeur:

Paul Simon in particular?

Dorianne Laux:

Yes. I mean, of course I read Walt Whitman. My mom had books of poetry around the house, Carl Sandburg and E.E. Cummings and all these. But really it was Paul Simon and it was The Beatles, and it was all these great lyricists, Bob Dylan, and so they were sort of my influences in a way. I feel like it's incumbent upon me to write a book, an homage to these people who really started my life as a poet. And not only in terms of the language which, and the music of language and all of that, but also just that poetic spirit, the feeling of those songs was poetry. It had a huge influence and continues to have an influence on me to this day. But I cannot listen to music and write because they war, especially if there's lyrics and I'm gone. If I could have been a musician, I would have. I think most of us in our generation would have been musicians because they were the geniuses.

Brian Brodeur:

They were the gods. Yeah, absolutely. Did you pal around with and hang out with musicians growing up?

Dorianne Laux:

I did.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah. Do you have friends who are musicians now?

Dorianne Laux:

Not so much. When I was growing up I was a groupie, and I grew up in San Diego and there was a band called Horse Feathers. They were an alternative rock band, and they opened for The Kinks and a few big name groups, and they were pretty famous in our little small town. I would be on the couch while they were in there practicing, and my boyfriends were always in a band, and I was just surrounded by it. Not so much anymore. Your life changes, you don't go out and listen to music as much. I don't even listen to music as much at home. Now I have Pandora, I finally figured out the Pandora thing so I can listen to it on my computer while I'm doing other things, which is nice. Not writing. I can even write prose. I can write something like not poetry, because then I'd just start writing Paul Simon lyrics.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, sure. With those new poems that you're writing about musicians, is it primarily 20th century musicians? Sixties, seventies?

Dorianne Laux:

Yeah. All the people that I mentioned. I do have a poem about, it's called Me Mother's Blues Volume One, and there are all these kind of lesser known blues singers who are singing not women's victim blues, but real assertive women's blues like, "I don't dig you, Jack." And, "You're not going to sleep in my bed." They're great.

Brian Brodeur:

There's one blues tune called Women, be wise, keep your mouth shut, don't advertise your man.

Dorianne Laux:

Yeah. Well, that's still... This is more like-

Brian Brodeur:

More assertive than empowered. Yeah.

Dorianne Laux:

One Hour Mama. I don't need no five minute man. I mean, these are really, they're out there.

Brian Brodeur:

Sounds great.

Dorianne Laux:

So I wrote a little poem for them. But yeah, mostly it's that era that I grew up in with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan. And pop music, Otis Redding. There was just so much going on. Smokey Robinson. I mean, you could just go on forever and ever. Joni Mitchell, I mean, don't get me started.

Brian Brodeur:

And a lot of these people are still at it, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, just keep on producing amazing music. Before you started teaching, you worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and donut holder among other occupations. How has this work, if at all, influenced your writing?

Dorianne Laux:

Well, I'm not sure. I think it's influenced my writing like everyone's life influences their writing, even whether or not they write about their life. It just always kind of haunts me when I think about Virginia Woolf. She says that her first memory was of being in the crib, and I guess some people can really remember back that far, it's just a fragment of memory. But she remembers a crib and the bars and looking out to white gauze windows that are kind of fluttering out from the open window. She can hear the waves, she can hear the ocean. And I think... And that's what she writes about. That is the complete and utter essence of Virginia Woolf. And so yeah-

Brian Brodeur:

You have the bars, you have the waves, you have-

Dorianne Laux:

Your life influences your writing. And so yeah, I have poems about some of those jobs, and certainly I can draw on all that wonderful narrative, the people that I knew in my life. But it's interesting because now that I am doing these poems about rock and roll, and it's more a tonal thing now that I'm trying to get at, more of a feeling, and it's very close to nostalgia, and that's what it is. When you go back to those times, you can't help but sink down into this nostalgia. So that's what I'm trying to do is work with that. Like, "Oh yeah, there was this feeling that came over me." And it comes over everyone when they hear songs, even if you're listening to heavy metal, and if that was the song that you first got some... That's the one that does it to you. And for our generation, it was these songs. So I'm trying to more capture the feeling of that.

Brian Brodeur:

So is it to capture the feeling of that time or how you feel about that time now?

Dorianne Laux:

Both. Exactly. That's kind of the wonderful thing is that you have the feeling of that time butting up against who you are now and what you feel now. Again, kind of like Bakersfield looking back on it, what's that conflict about?

Brian Brodeur:

Also in your poems, they're kind of populated by characters, grocery clerks, graffiti artists, musicians, waitresses, et cetera. Do you view your role as a poet, at least partially, to sing the lives of those seldom written about?

Dorianne Laux:

Yeah, I think it has happened that way. Not that I ever set out necessarily to do anything like that but when I, again, look back, I think yes, that's something that I was interested in seeing those people that were very just kind of ordinary people living their lives, and for someone just to really see them and see how beautiful they were and interesting and fucked up and crazy and weird and all those things. If there's no one there to look, they don't get seen.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, it seems like those poems about some of those characters, they seem like almost old-fashioned praise poems in a way. They seem very celebratory. Is it, that's just kind of how it happened? Well, first of all, do you agree with that?

Dorianne Laux:

Yeah, yeah. I think they are. Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

And so I guess, is it almost a political maybe stance that you're taking that these people need to be celebrated? No one else is doing it now. I guess it's me.

Dorianne Laux:

Yeah. I wish I could say that I was that political about it because I do feel very strongly about it, but it's only in retrospect, I'm sorry to say. I never in a poem set out to do anything. I don't say, "Man, I need to write a political poem. Man, I need to write a poem about.." The closest I get is something like, for instance, "Oh, I'd love to write a poem about Tom Waits." But I have no idea what's going to become of that. I'd like to write a poem about what's out the window, but I don't. That's as close as I get to it. I certainly don't think, wow, I've got to be the voice for these people. But in retrospect, I realized that that does tend to give others a voice when you kind of reveal them to more than one other person. It becomes politicized, but I don't set out to do it. I think in fact, if I did, it could be problematic for me.

Brian Brodeur:

It would seem like a lot of pressure-

Dorianne Laux:

As an artist-

Brian Brodeur:

Sort of a crushing... To have that intention and to take that consciously onto your shoulders. Since 1990, you've taught poetry at various private and public venues across the country, including Pacific University's Low Residency MFA, and the Truro Center of the Arts at Castle Hill among others. How has teaching, if at all, affected your work as a poet?

Dorianne Laux:

Well, it's wonderful because it gives you the entire summer to write. That's really affected my life as a poet. When I was waitressing, I had my shift breaks, and I came home from work pretty tired, and not that I wouldn't write. I would because at least I had the mental energy for it. I didn't maybe have the physical energy, but I was excited.

Brian Brodeur:

Wasn't the most intellectually demanding job.

Dorianne Laux:

Yeah, exactly.

Brian Brodeur:

Your feet are tired, not your brain.

Dorianne Laux:

Right, and not your emotions really, in that way. Whereas teaching, I get very passionate, heated up in class talking about poetry, and so I come home and I really am actually emotionally exhausted because I've been talking about what I love for three hours straight. And then taking a break, eating some lunch, and talking about what I love for another three hours straight. So it does affect you, but I always think of what Philip Levine says, which is that teaching at the university is a lot better than working. I mean, its work, but it's not-

Brian Brodeur:

Some people work for a living.

Dorianne Laux:

Right, yeah. It's a very different kind of work. My students have affected my writing a lot. They're doing such interesting things and they take such risks and they see the world in such a different way, and it keeps my world broad and wide. To be in contact with these young poets who are coming up, can't be anything but good for a poet who's on the other side of that, because you always want to have that sense of spectrum. So I think that's a really lucky thing, that you're in contact with young people who are in the art that you love and trying to find new ways into it.

Brian Brodeur:

Do you prefer teaching literature courses or creative writing courses, or are they just two completely separate?

Dorianne Laux:

No, they're not separate at all, except that I am not qualified to teach literature courses in the sense that my expertise is sort of contemporary American poetry with an emphasis on women's poetry, and clearly an emphasis on poetry of work and people and place. I couldn't talk at length about very many particular poets. I could tell you a lot about Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson and Whitman. There are a few poets that I do know something about, but really it's contemporary poetry. Most of what I teach is exactly that kind of thing.

I teach a seminar called The Poetry of Sex and Death because those really are the only two subjects as far as I'm concerned. So we read books outside of poetry. We read Thomas Lynch's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Undertaking, which Six Feet Under was based on. A beautifully written book. Gorgeous, gorgeous book. Students love it. They also read a kind of quick history, as quick as you can get, Western attitudes towards sexuality and Western attitudes toward death, and they also read poems of course. So we find poems throughout history that deal with sex and death and try to see how attitudes towards sex and death have changed over time in terms of poetry. But it's more of a kind of seminar. It is poets talking about an interesting aspect of poetry as poets, as practitioners of the art. I'm not teaching it to students and-

Brian Brodeur:

Got to expect [inaudible 00:28:57] theoretical-

Dorianne Laux:

Running down the dates for them and asking them for theoretical. Yeah, exactly. So they're fun courses. I teach another course called The Poetry of Working Class, and we read Studs Terkel's, Working. Then they also read poems about work, and they're expected to write poems, write a poem in the voice of a worker, write a poem in the language of work. Because of course, work has its own language.

Brian Brodeur:

That's right.

Dorianne Laux:

Write a poem in which you observe a worker. Then my husband added a new twist to it, which was that he'd have the students go out and interview someone, like Studs Terkel, interview someone in the town, and so these kids went out and did this. And the people fell so in love with these kids who interviewed the guy at the bagel place. He'd come into the classroom with a whole box of bagels. Once again, somebody was seen. He was seen, and what he was doing was valued enough that the kid came out and said, "Tell me about your life. Tell me how this works." They made friends throughout the town with that little project. But those aren't literature courses. They're more either practitioner of the art, or here is a way into poetry.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, they sound like classes where it seems like the intention is to get students to fall in love with writing and literature, which is-

Dorianne Laux:

And know what the power of it is.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah. It seems extremely valuable. You mentioned your husband earlier. You're married to the wonderful poet, Joseph Millar, of course,

Dorianne Laux:

Indeed I am.

Brian Brodeur:

What is it like sharing your life with another artist, particularly one who practices the same craft?

Dorianne Laux:

It's terrific. A lot of people have a hard time with it, and I completely understand that you could. I have just lucked out. We have lucked out as a couple. We can work together, and that doesn't mean we work together, but I mean, we can live in the same house. He can be sitting there writing a poem. I want to kill him when I see him writing a poem, and I could be sitting there writing a poem and the same thing. He's like, "Are you writing a poem? You better not be writing a poem. If you're writing a poem, I'm going to write a poem. What are you writing a poem about?"

Brian Brodeur:

Better not be me.

Dorianne Laux:

Right! There is this wonderful kind of fake competitiveness, but really we just love it. We love that we live in the same house with someone who is as passionate as we are about this art, and it's great to have an editor living right there where you can just say... The only thing we have to watch out for is showing each other work too soon. We try to hold back, because if you end up seeing a poem like 25 times, you're truly ready to kill the person. It is like, "If you show me this poem one more time, you're going out the window." But we've just been lucky, and we can write together. We do exercises together. We encourage each other. The weekend will come, I'm kind of depressed or tired or pissed or whatever, and he'll go, "Let's go for a drive. Take your notebook. We'll go down and look at the river for a while and write a poem." It's great, right? We can do that for each other, and I'll do the same thing for him. Let's go somewhere and write.

Brian Brodeur:

That's wonderful. Well, let's leave it there. Dorianne Laux, thanks very much.

Dorianne Laux:

Hey, thank you, Brian.

Speaker 1:

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