KARAN

A lot of your poems start with details that seem autobiographical. I wonder if this is because you write a lot? I suspect that you write a lot. Do you? Do you have a writing routine? And what is your process like? How do you begin, write, and finish a poem? Has it changed over the years? 

DAVID

I write a ton, Karan. I always have. There’s never been a particular routine; I just write a little whenever I can, and over time, it adds up. I don’t play golf, I love to write, and editors seem to like to publish my poems, so I do my best to send them my best work. And, yes, I do write autobiographically in the sense that if I think or overhear or read something that engages me, that’s as much a part of my life as marlin fishing and bullfights were for Hemingway. That said, the person who speaks in my poems is not quite me. I try to make him be someone who’s always worth listening to. I aspire to be the person I’ve created, you might say.

KARAN

Themes of love, heartbreak, and the resultant emotional turmoil too are central to these poems, and are often depicted with vivid, sometimes violent imagery. In “She’s Not There,” love transforms into monstrous rage, demonstrating the thin line between deep affection and destructive anger. You’re exploring both love and beauty and “the kind of rage that just makes you want to obliterate the person you adored five minutes earlier . . .” Yet your poetry is not the poetry of the extreme — it is about the everyday joys and sorrows. This is not a question per se, just more of an observation. Would you like to say a thing about this?

DAVID

I love your description of what I’m trying to do. Yes, in the course of a day we do our jobs, play with our kids, let the cat out, run errands, let the cat back in, and take care of business just generally, even as we might think “Boy, I’d like to have sex with her” and “I really should have bashed his brains in” and “I wonder if I still have time to try out for the NFL.” Those three statements are just fantasies, but we all have them. I try to paint the whole picture, in other words: the outer life, the inner life, whatever else fits. I want to make sure you have plenty on your plate.

KARAN

You’ve never shied away from pop-culture references — George Harrison, “Pretty Peggy-O,” Mussolini, Hitler, Joan of Arc, Louise Erdrich — these make the poems more accessible. They are also where a lot of the humor is introduced in the poems, as in Denise Duhamel’s poetry. These pop-cultural references contribute to the richness of your poems by anchoring them in specific times, cultural contexts, and shared experiences. They also serve as bridges between the personal and the collective, inviting readers to relate to the speaker’s reflections through familiar cultural touchpoints. How do you approach incorporating pop-cultural references into your poetic craft? Are these references a deliberate choice to enhance accessibility, create layers of meaning, or establish a specific tone within your work? Could you share insights into your process of selecting and weaving these references into your poems?

DAVID

I think you’ve hit upon the answer yourself, Karan. A cultural reference is the best kind of shorthand, isn’t it? If I want to bring on a certain mood or get a particular reaction from a reader, all I have to do is say “Nelson Mandela” or “Emily Dickinson” or “Metallica.” That way I don’t need to write entire paragraphs about South African politics or poetic inventiveness or what sets heavy metal apart from other kinds of music. I have to choose carefully, of course, and hope that most of my readers will get most of my references most of the time. I don’t want you to have to race to Wikipedia every third stanza. I want you to stay with the poem.

KARAN

One thing I love about these poems (and also more generally in poetry) is how playful they are, in the sense that I can tell that the poet has had a lot of fun while writing them. “Oman” tickled me pink! So humorously does it explore cultural misunderstandings and personal anecdotes to discuss global and personal connections. I can tell you care a great deal about humor. I recently made a list and realized all my favorite poets/writers make me laugh: Bob Hicok, Mary Ruefle, Leigh Chadwick. We recently interviewed Chen Chen, who, in an essay, says: “Funny people are hotter than non-funny people and funny poets are the hottest people, period.” Would you speak a bit more about the role humor plays/has played in your work over the years, particularly in poems that engage with social commentary, and how much do you care about balancing play and wit with critique?

DAVID

I agree with you and Chen Chen, and I think what you’re both endorsing is a mix of different kinds of rhetoric. Okay, that’s pretty boring — wake up, Karan! I can talk my way out of this. What I mean is that smart people, fun people, engaging people have in common a way of being informative, entertaining, and helpful all in the same moment. The ideal speaker in a poem is like your smart neighbor, the one you talk to on the sidewalk who’s happy to give you their banana bread recipe and let you know you can borrow a chainsaw if you need it and agrees that such-and-such a public figure is an idiot even if not everyone knows that yet. Some people have called me a humorous or comic poet as if that’s mainly what I am, which is fine as long as they mean it as a compliment. But I’d rather be called a generous poet (see “I want to make sure you have plenty on your plate,” above).  If some readers highlight the humor in my poems to the exclusion of anything else, I think that’s because they’ve mainly encountered poems that are just plain dismal and are happy to know that poetry is potentially so much more — the sky’s the limit, as we poets like to say, and actually, the possibilities don’t even stop there.

KARAN

Your poems, with their myriads of digressions and movements, often pose existential questions about the nature of reality, perception, and the human condition. Each poem here does that. “Cause of Death Unknown” does this most obviously, exploring the ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding a death, prompting reflections on the unknown aspects of life: “Guy’s mom had had a stroke, of course; / the coroner could tell that just by looking / at her. She’d dressed, had breakfast, / read her Bible . . .” Is writing poetry for you a way to explore existential themes, and a way to seek insights about the human condition?

DAVID

That’s a good way to put it, I think. Sometimes I tell my students that a poem is a little problem-solving machine, which upsets the ones who want their poems to be cosmic and grandiose. But all the great poets start with a problem: Homer needs to get Odysseus back to Ithaca, Dante has to get himself into and then out of Hell again, and so on. I’m working on a much smaller scale, of course, but there are still things I can only figure out by writing poems about them, starting with “who am I, really?” and “who do I love and why, and what the hell is love, anyway?”

KARAN

We recently made a point of asking seasoned poets for advice for young writers. You’ve published many well-acclaimed books and have also been a distinguished professor of poetry for many years. What is something you’d like to say to young writers, as way of advice or caveats?

DAVID

Yikes! I was afraid you’d ask me that. There are about 27 or maybe 43 things to consider, and recently I published a textbook called The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them, which is 400+ pages that deal with everything a poet needs to know. But if I had to pick one thing over all the others,  I guess I’d say not to worry about being a poet or trying to write great poems and instead work on acquiring the mind of a poet. The mind of a poet is one that collects anything that might be useful, even if its use is not apparent at the time—two hundred years ago, Laurence Sterne said, “What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.” It notices everything, warehouses everything (that’s why I make my students keep “bits journals”), and over time figures out what to start with, what to end with, what to put in the middle and in what order. The mind of a poet works calmly and steadily all day long, every day, and it sleeps deeply at night because it knows that the world will be there in the morning, just waiting to be turned into poems. I tell students I don’t care if they ever write another poem after they leave my class but that I insist they acquire the mind of a poet — not true, but you can’t do the first if you haven’t done the second.

KARAN

Additionally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would also love to know poets who have influenced you most.

DAVID

Keats for lushness, Whitman for scope, Dickinson for inventiveness, Shakespeare for generosity, the early rock pioneers like Buddy Holly and Little Richard and Carl Perkins for sheer excitement. I’m a little mistrustful of the whole idea of influence, especially when self-described, because you can talk your head off, but there’s a lot to this whole process that is and will remain mysterious, meaning I don’t find that we’re all that great about identifying precisely what makes us tick. But the people I’ve named are my motorcycle gang — can’t you see Dickinson on a Harley-Davidson Hydra-Glide? — and I love to ride down the highway with them. I should also mention my mother, a farm girl who told the best stories ever, and my father, a scholar who trafficked in languages like Old Norse. They’re by the side of the road, waving their hankies as we roar past. And look, there’s a third figure with them. It’s that new poet, the one whose name I don’t know yet and whom I’m about to learn from.