BK: Who are some of your favorite
writers? Who has influenced or helped model your own
writing?
DL: There are so many poets whose work has been important
to me. Some of my all-time favorites: Dickinson, Stevens,
Plath. I’ve just finished reading Anne Carson’s
Decreation, Mary Gaitskill’s novel Veronica,
and Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar.
BK: You
teach at The New School in New York City. What drew
you to the institution?
DL: The New School has a wonderful creative writing
program. It’s smack in the middle of Greenwich
Village so you get a real sense of the vibrancy of the
literary community. Over 50 special events—readings,
programs, panel discussions—take place every semester
so a wide variety of acclaimed writers come through
to read and speak throughout the year.
BK: It sounds like an exciting
place to work. Do you enjoy being there?
DL: I love teaching there--the students are dedicated
and serious and the faculty are excellent, and the history
of the place is so rich. Over the years New School faculty
have included Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell,
Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, Stanley Kunitz, May
Swenson, and many others. The New School Writing Program
offers an undergraduate concentration, an MFA degree,
and a Summer Writers Colony.
BK: Orchidelirium
is your first collection of poems. Is it an anthology
of some of your earlier work or were all these poems
composed together during a period of time?
DL: The first two-thirds of the book were written over
a ten-year period. The third section of the book—“Manhattan
Fragments”—was written during the days,
months and year following September 11th and added to
the manuscript last, after the book had already been
accepted for publication.
BK: What is the meaning behind sorting
the poems into three sections?
DL: The poems seemed naturally to sort themselves. Section
1 of the book details a daughter’s coming of age
during her mother’s illness and after the mother’s
death, the poems of section 2 address the pleasures
and languors of love, marriage, and domestic life, and
the poems in the final section register the griefs and
anxieties of living in post 9/11 downtown Manhattan.
Anhinga Press
2004, $12
BK: When I read Orchidelirium,
I found some poems to be more like stories and others
more like pieces of art. For instance, "A Pair
of Men's Briefs, Size 36" and "Traffic in
West Hollywood" come across almost like prose in
the way they tell a story. These contrast with poems
such as "Sunday Afternoon" and "Bearing
Down," which I found more abstractly emotional.
What determines the style in which you write these?
Could "Traffic" have been written in the style
of "Bearing Down," or vice versa? And what
propels you to compose a poem after some experiences?
I am sure you have seen male underwear before and have
dreamt many times on a Sunday afternoon. Why tell us
about these instances?
DL: You’re right, the poems in the book are a
mix of narrative and lyric. I was experimenting with
style. When I wrote “Bearing Down,” I was
sitting in on a master class with David Trinidad at
The New School in 1994 and he asked us to write a poem
with very short lines. That’s the gift of a workshop—you
end up writing poems you would have never written otherwise
because you’re given an assignment, and then your
range expands.
“A Pair of Men’s Briefs,
Size 36” is the oldest poem in the book—the
puppy in the poem is now a very old dog. I still see
this ex-puppy and his owner (no longer very boyish)
in the neighborhood where I live. That poem wasn’t
written about a literal experience (finding a pair of
men’s underwear in my laundry basket). Rather,
I wanted to use an image or metaphor that would enable
exploration of sexual restlessness and longing.
The more I write the more interested
I am in fragments, in poems that cut to the quick of
a mood or experience rather than attempt to represent
it fully for the reader. Certainly a poem like “Traffic
in West Hollywood” could be compressed into a
shorter lyric, and it might make a better, more interesting
poem—for example, now that I look at it, the last
three stanzas of the poem could probably stand on their
own. That’s probably what I would do with it now.
The new poems I am writing, a series of Nocturnes—middle
of the night, mid-winter, insomniac poems—are
all much sparer. The looser, associative style and fragmented
quality of these poems is more interesting to me at
the moment.
BK: What kind of poems are
you working on now?
DL: The more I write the more interested I am in fragments,
in poems that cut to the quick of a mood or experience
rather than attempt to represent it fully for the reader.
The new poems I am writing, a series of Nocturnes—middle
of the night, mid-winter, insomniac poems—are
all much sparer. The looser, associative style and fragmented
quality of these poems is more interesting to me at
the moment.
BK: Why do you enjoy giving
readings of your work?
DL: I love to give readings because it’s a nice
way to reach readers and feel connected to a larger
literary community. Lately I’ve been using readings
as a sort of deadline by which to finish a series of
new poems, so I’ll be reading some poems from
my new manuscript, Nocturnes, as well as a selection
from my first book.
