SHANNAN

I remember when Karan and I first read and then re-read (as we got more of) your poems. He was already a fan, and it didn’t take me long to become obsessed with the way you speak about this conflagrant, volatile thing that is desire (particularly the way you frame it) with such incredible control. Even when in, “When You Are Twelve” you write “boys spike thumbs beneath your ribs, turn you inside out” I do not feel you are describing a victim. Sure, it might in and of itself seem . . . far-stretched? . . . to label preteen antics via the binaries of victimhood or abuse (at least in the general way they get carried around the world), but still, you are writing about something many young girls might experience and that can — at that age — break them, hurt them, or make them feel a whole list of horrible (or perhaps, weirdly positive?) things. And yet, your speaker stays in charge. You are like a hawk looking into this scene, reclaiming it, reframing it, and with that confident voice, refusing to submit to hierarchical binaries and cliched scenarios. Now, this isn’t to say that you are not constructing a complex layer of emotions here. In “You Meet a Boy” you write, “You are always on the verge of crying. At soccer, boys kick you, slap you, bruise you. Do it again, you pray.” Despite the fact that we are seeing more and more woman-positive narratives, such a delicate exploration of girlhood still is not prevalent or even understood as necessary. In connection with any of what I’ve noted here, I’d love to hear more about how you tackle any challenges that arise for you in crafting your poetry. 

DORSEY

Wow, your comment about the speaker of “When You Are Twelve” being violated and yet not a victim is so poignant! I grew up in a purity culture, and it often felt like the only way to envision sex or sexuality as a girl was from the perspective of a victim. I didn’t have language for a sex-positive perspective back then, or any license or ownership over my own desire. In fact, I have realized through writing these poems that I still have work to do with regard to claiming my sexuality. In the poems you’ve described, I am deliberately engaging impulses and acts that I thought were too dark, too embarrassing, too deviant to speak about back then. I used to worry about the distortion that memory intrinsically involves, but at the end of the day the poems are working on capturing the spirit of the moments rather than the letter of them. What I find more challenging is not enacting the violence I am trying to critique in the poems, especially when working with a speaker who is both twelve and actively telling us she is not twelve anymore. A certain amount of perspective on events has to make itself felt, but not so much that the feeling of twelve, or whatever age the speaker is in the series, is erased. For example, that line about the speaker praying the boys will bruise her again. I extend so much grace to that girl now — there were no safe or consensual ways for her to be touched, and she found a way to fulfill her needs. In the poems, I try to render her experience without directing judgment at her, or at the boys, for that matter, but at the interlocking systems of patriarchy that set her up for those experiences. 

SHANNAN

One thing I am thrilled by is the variety of forms in this packet. You have prose poems, a poem with couplets, a free-verse without stanza breaks, a poem with that fancy line-breaking we’re seeing more and more now, and then a sonnet (my favorite!). I’m often curious about the way form interacts with (and ideally, one would hope, enhances) content. I notice that whereas with the prose poems your voice is directive, the lineated poetry tends to feel more open, more unexpected in the way it turns. I wonder, of course, if this is just the influence of the form. And yet, there’s more when you scratch the surface of the language. In “For My Niece, Watching The Fox & The Hound,” you open with “You ask me when the fox will be on the wall” and carry that single sentence (a brilliantly cohesive sentence I must add) all the way up until “insistent hands against his nose.” That’s ten whole couplets. Very Marquezian! Then, in “My Football Team is Winning,” I keep going back to that first line and that gap between “And a man is so fucking     happy for me.” I usually am stumped by caesura, but this one (and honestly, all the others in this piece) just clicked. I felt like I was hearing a monologue on a stage and the line gaps were recorded, deeply felt breaths taken by the actor. What is your relationship to different forms? Do you usually begin from the outside in (choose the form and then write the poem), or does the form develop around the poem? 

DORSEY

Boy, am I terrified of fancy line-breaking! The sonnet with the spatial caesuras was a big leap for me. I’m totally in awe of poets like my friends Eleanor Boudreau, Alexa Doran, and Jessica Stark, who really know what they’re doing when they move their words around the field of the page. With “My Football Team is Winning,” which is a sonnet series that takes up a whole section of my second manuscript, the form did begin with that caesura you highlighted — “a man is so fucking   happy for me.” I thought it was a way to extend the content — the speaker is intoxicated with victory and alcohol and I almost heard the spatial caesuras as like, well-timed hiccups in her speech. But they also work as disruptions. The speaker is there in the stadium experiencing this surreal moment. Confetti is falling. Everyone is hugging and crying. And still, men are making claims on her attention, her time. So I thought the spatial caesuras mirrored the disrupted, take-you-out-of-the-moment quality of those text messages. I don’t think I exactly pulled all of them off, but it’s scary to try new things, so just taking a chance with the form feels like a win. 

In terms of that formal variety you’re talking about, though, I feel like it’s a product of me still evolving into form. I’m a very good mimic, so you will see my poems from my MFA program looking very terse with a shorter line and very precise breaks where I’m trying to be like my teacher, Amy Fleury. And then my Ph.D. institution had a totally different bent, more like the Fox & the Hound poem, where the sentences never end and the whole poem just feels like it’s spilling out. These days I’m somewhere in between the two—”a lot of my recent poems are one stanza with a lot of enjambment and about a ten to twelve syllable line. Ellen Bass does this really well, and Sharon Olds, of course. Both of their work has had a huge influence on my use of form. 

SHANNAN

This might sound a little weird, but where else, if not in poetry, can we welcome getting (more than) a little weird? I love how you use texture and substance in your poem. In “My Football Team is Winning,” you describe the speaker with “liquor dribbling over [her] eyelids” before “slosh[ing] back” as a way to describe talking back. I loved that so much. It’s fun, it’s pop, it’s deep, it’s fucking smart. Later, you write about “an angel brown with tobacco / spit and bourbon” and I can taste and smell that all in the air. One of the things we offer at ONLY POEMS is editorial feedback and very often I find myself urging poets to make the reader feel something. I am aware it can all feel like a mystery, sometimes. What words transport you, what kind of language recreates true tangible sensory experience . . . and is truly a recreation? Or perhaps there are unusual things a poet does like “slosh back,” that pull us out of the reading stupor and make us feel we are actually living inside the world of the poem. Is there a way that you can qualify how this takes place? What might you offer to a poet — whether it’s a tool, or the annoying yet increasingly popular term “hack” — who is trying to fire up their language in a way that is very fluid for you? 

DORSEY

The hack is strong verbs! This semester I taught a Writing for Health class that was very grammar-forward because they’re learning how to write concisely for APA style, and it taught me a lot about my poems. For example, I realized that I excise “being” verbs in favor of verbs that suit the poem’s content whenever I can. So, for example, a draft of “My Football Team is Winning” had the verb “text” back in that same spot where “slosh” is now. I thought, we’ve got alcohol imagery throughout this poem, so how can this verb extend that imagery? I also love to “verb” a noun whenever I can — for example when I say, “I try to metaphor desire” in “Rejected Persona.” My first drafts are often written quickly and are almost exclusively “feeling,” as you said, and then I go back and try to make craft choices that amplify that feeling in revision. 

SHANNAN

I mentioned earlier that my favorite poem of this lot (a seriously hard choice) is “Pumping Sonnet.” And I’ll proudly say that it’s because, well, I’ve been there. I have been that woman trying to write with her “tits poking through secret holes” (I laughed out loud at this and then almost cried). You compare the pump to a “sex toy” with its “rhythmic robot square dance” and I’m not sure if anyone who hasn’t been hooked up to those damn things can truly get that, but it is a truly brilliant description, one that completely captures the experience while still reaching outwards and still evoking, through its strange yet piercingly precise craftsmanship, a version of the experience itself. One of my favorite lines here is “I am obliged to nourish myself.” Of course, within the context of pumping (and breastfeeding), this is very specific, but it is also emblematic of what we as writers ought to feel obligated to do, to nourish ourselves with whatever it is that will motivate us to write. And if new moms with postpartum depression can do this while pumping, then certainly so can the rest of us. So, what are some things that nourish you in your creative process? Also, how does this work around or within the role of a mother that often competes (and wins out) in the intensity of our roles as writers?

DORSEY

First of all, thank you so much for loving this poem. I wrote it at the Anderson Center when my son was nine months old. The residency had been postponed for two years, first for COVID and then because I was pregnant and nearing my due-date. My partner and I cooked up a wild scheme for me to pump milk for the whole residency and then have it shipped to him at the end of the first week in a refrigerated box. So I’m in this gorgeous old house where I’m supposed to be focused on my writing completely for two weeks, but I’m running up and down the stairs five times a day washing pump parts and bottles and overtaking the residency fridge with milk bags. I always had an adversarial relationship to pumping, but, man, I despised that machine in a special way during that residency. I vented my frustration into this poem after the pumping process interrupted me reading Diane Seuss’s luminous Frank: Sonnets. So, to return to the question of how I nourish myself as a creative person, I feel like it’s more about leaning into disruption and turning the parts of my life that conspire against writing into the writing itself. Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day is my ur-text for this strategy — I read it before I had my son, but my awe of Mayer took on a new reverence after I gave birth and came to understand just how much mental space is dedicated to a child in the early months and years. Reading nourishes, but I might only have time for a couple poems while he’s busy putting on my eyeshadow. Teaching writing nourishes, but all my reading assignments are about motherhood, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum because my obsession with these things is driving my process. My son, as much as he likes to get under my feet, is actually nourishment in the extreme because he is obsession in the extreme. He’s given me a whole book of poems and, more importantly, helped me access a new level of my writing that has more substance, and more at stake, than what I was doing before. 

SHANNAN

Alongside desire, you also play with the absence of it through an existential lens. “Rejected Persona: Patron of the Arts” hints at this symbolically — a “fox fur coat” (something that might be conventionally symbolic of affluence and thus the capitalist version of enjoyment) is offering “this nude nothingness buzz.” You write, “I try to metaphor desire, but it’s just / a thin veil. . . .” And the ending of “quiet, little beat: / just me, just me, just me” is very reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s famous “old bray of my heart: I am I am I am.” Now, I unabashedly love Plath’s work and don’t think it can be reduced to this, but at the end of the day, it can be quite depressing. I notice that we are vigilant about keeping the poem from dipping onto too much abject melancholy, always bringing up the humor and keeping us afloat. How do you discern these moments that call for levity as opposed to those demanding more of raw, unfiltered emotions? What are your thoughts on humor in poetry? Is it important for you?

DORSEY

I wouldn’t say that I am consciously looking for moments that need levity. It’s more that I am kind of a silly person and the way I experience the world reflects that. In “Rejected Persona,” the speaker envisions her desire “down a well, Silence of the Lambs-style,” and this is because I think about Silence of the Lambs basically every day. It’s a big text in my life, so it comes up in my poems. If that reads as funny because of the pop culture reference next to the speaker’s depressed state, or whatever, then hooray! Honestly, my problems themselves feel a little ridiculous to me, even as they overwhelm me. If my speaker thought the worst problem in the world was her not feeling sexy after giving birth, that would not be a speaker people wanted to listen to. My hope is that occasional humor diffuses that complain-y quality a bit. 

I am always drawn to humor in poetry, especially as a tool to satirize or speak back to power. For instance, I recently read Threa Almontaser’s poem “When White Boys Ask to See My Hair” from her collection The Wild Fox of Yemen. Although the poem has serious concerns, it is infused with bitingly funny lines like “My hair fell off the long line at Mt. Everest trying to take a selfie.” Too many poets to name are bringing humor into unexpected places in their work, and I am absolutely here for it.  

SHANNAN

I love the care and attention with which you’ve answered these, Dorsey. Thank you! Finally, we would also love to know poets who have influenced you most.

DORSEY

Oh no, I accidentally named most of them in my answers! I will sneak in a few more. My AWP haul this year had collections by Nicky Beer, Megan Fernandes, and Hala Alyan that taught me so much. And I always return to Nickole Brown’s Fanny Says and Khadijah Queen’s I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On. Bonus: they are all also funny!