KARAN

Dean, thank you for these meditative and delightful poems. I love the voice in which you explore selfhood, memory, and the interplay between the visual and verbal. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you approach writing a poem? Do you start with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, why poetry?

DEAN

First of all, thank you Karan, for featuring my poems and for your thoughtful and generous questions. I love ONLY POEMS. Your enthusiasm is contagious!

So, to the poems. In general, I start poems for three reasons. There is a problem somewhere in my thinking, in the world, in my memory, in poetry, in art, in our social fabric — and I want to ask questions about that problem. I don’t try to solve it, but I do want to try to understand it through questions. Or there is a line, a phrase, that sets up camp in my brain and simply won’t leave until I exorcise it by making a poem that incorporates it. “The dead are at my door again,” is a good example. And lastly — and most rare — there is a kind of poem I want to write, like a pantoum or a sonnet or an ekphrastic poem, and then I set out to see what I can do within the limitations (or possibilities) of that form. 

I wish I had a routine for poetry. I do for prose. If I am working on a prose book or a review or an essay that has a deadline, I try to write on all non-teaching days and part of one day on the weekend. For poetry, I find that I can’t force a poem. But I also can’t ignore one either. For example, I’ve been asked to write a poem in response to the artwork of a German painter, and I have the painting picked out, and a line I want to use, and a general sense of where I want the poem to go, and how I want it to sound. So, I keep trying different opening lines. So far, nothing is working. And it’s bugging me. But I know I’ll figure it out. 

Eventually . . . 

Why poetry? When I was in college, and really searching for something that made me feel the presence of something larger than myself — the sublime, the divine, the transcendent, the uncanny — the only thing that came close was poetry. And so I decided I would try to create poems that might, one day, make other people feel the way poems made me feel. 

KARAN

The self-portraits here are particularly fascinating — employing dreams to Wikipedia entries to sports, all leading to some sort of philosophical inquiry (especially referring to “Self-Portrait in Sleep”). What is it about the tradition/form of “self-portrait” that is so appealing to people? In a way, most poems written are self-portraits . . . maybe that’s a stretch, maybe not? What do you think? What draws you to revisit this form in so many different ways?

DEAN

Well, you really hit on some interests of mine, many of which culminated in my 2017 collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry. There are so many self-portraits in that book, as well as poems that, like Wikipedia entries, lean toward crowdsourcing. 

I’m beguiled by the way self-hood is made. What is a “biography?” An “autobiography?” Also, in that book, many of the self-portraits are not about me at all but about America, the globe. The fragility of both.

The poems here in ONLY POEMS seem to be interested in that odd, transitive state between waking and sleeping, between thinking and dreaming, between knowing and wondering. Lately, I have been particularly curious about moments when we are alone with our selfhood. Our anxieties. Our fears. Our desires. Our dreams. 

Personally, I like self-portraits because they reference visual art’s ability to offer a strange mix of subjective and objective perspectives. In that way, I think you are probably right that most poems are probably some sort of self-portrait. Can the poet look inward and outward equally?

KARAN

As both a poet and a scholar who has written about Cy Twombly’s art, how do you see the relationship between visual art and poetry? I love ekphrasis, but feel your relationship with Cy’s work goes beyond that fairly simple relationship of seeing/seeking inspiration. Would you speak about that? 

DEAN

Oh, thank you! That was my goal in Before the Borderless — to go beyond mere ekphrasis or description. To alter how we think about “written” and “visual” texts.  What if Twombly’s paintings are “writing” and my poems are “images?” What does that do to our notion of language? Semiotics? Inscrutability?

For me, poems are always visual texts. Of course, they are written texts, but I always see a poem before I read it. 

I think most poems are more akin to visual art than, say, fiction. Poems swim in the seas of connotation, motion, convergence. Much like art. When I see a Rothko painting or an Agnes Martin painting, I don’t feel pressure to “understand” them or “decode” them. I don’t expect their paintings to contain an overt “meaning.” I just want to feel and think my way into them. They are working on me in ways I don’t always understand. I feel the same about most poems.

KARAN

As a poet who often references sports, particularly basketball, I’m intrigued by how you use athletic metaphors in poems like “Self-Portrait in Sleep” and “American Triptych.” Tell us also about your relationship with sports, and then the connection you see between sports and poetry. Tim Seibles has a magnificent basketball poem — “For Brothers Everywhere” — that I think you’d really dig. What makes basketball such a fertile ground for poetic exploration? 

DEAN

I love that poem. How he mixes jazz and basketball is so good. The poem itself is like a great pickup game.

Sports poems can be a lot of fun. I teach them sometimes. I highly recommend a great anthology of sports writing edited by Natalie Diaz called Bodies Built for Game. I really experienced the dream I write about in “Self-Portrait in Sleep.” I regularly have basketball dreams, but this one freaked me out. It was both otherworldly and at the same time, totally me. 

I don’t know that I necessarily see a connection between sports and poetry. “Sport” is so vast, and sports are so different from each other. It does not seem possible that basketball, golf and NASCAR could ever fit under the same umbrella, and yet . . .

I do think there is a kinship between poetry and basketball. To me, the court looks like an open book. There is movement back and forth across the page. Plays and players are always paying homage to the greats that preceded them. A great line of poetry can land like a dunk or a glorious three-pointer. Both are celebrations.

In 2015, I was asked by the San Francisco Chronicle to write a poem about the Golden State Warriors championship run. As I worked on the poem, I found corresponding energies between basketball and poetry — engagement, teamwork, movement. Basketball is a sport of constant invention and revision. That reminds me of poetry.

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. I mean, as all great poets, I can see all four elements in your work, but where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry moving to a different direction?

DEAN

Hmmm . . . that’s so interesting. And thank you for your kind observation. 

Rather than seeing these categories as four distinct silos, I might reframe things a little bit and talk about these concepts as a Venn diagram in which the body, the mind, the soul, and the heart overlap in various ways and to various degrees. There are poems of mine where the heart section will be larger than the body section. Poems in which the mind section will be dominant. I think that might be the case for many poems from Before the Borderless. But there are also poems from that book, like the elegies for my father and mother, that are all heart. And soul. 

I think great poems plant flags in all of these countries. Some just wave larger and louder than others.

KARAN

In “Still Life with Absolution” you explore themes of forgiveness and culpability through repetition. The poem moves between personal and political responsibility: “People are being shot in the street in the fields in prison. I am thinking very hard about them but also about my league championship basketball game on Wednesday.” I sense self-criticism in this and reminds me of this Leonard Cohen lyric: “There’s torture, and there’s killing / and there’s all my bad reviews.” I don’t really have a question here but how do you approach writing about the tension between individual experience and collective responsibility? At the risk of sounding generic, or asking too vague a question: Where does the personal meet the political?

DEAN

Oh man. For me, this is the great question for poetry. For all art really. 

As I note above, I have spent my entire career as a poet trying to look inward and outward equally. I don’t think of myself as a “political poet” but a lot of my poems see the world through a political lens. I don’t think of myself as an autobiographical poet or a confessional poet, but a lot of my poems ask really intense questions about the self and/or reveal uncertainties and disappointments about my own life. 

That line you quote from “Still Life with Absolution” is almost a transcript of my daily thought processes. I ask every day: Am I doing enough? And, I don’t know the answer to that question. I think it is something most artists struggle with.

There is a late poem by Wallace Stevens that begins:

I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life,

As a questioner about reality,

A countryman of all the bones in the world?

I think Stevens’ fear here is that he questions the world too much, that he does not take a stand, does not participate in the world to the extent he should. Is he, essentially, bloodless? And then there is Cesar Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet, who just stopped writing poetry, opting instead to devote his energies to writing a book on Marxism and working with the poor. But that did not go so well. Ultimately, he returned to writing poetry and produced some of his best poems. What is the right thing to do? For the poet, there may only be poetry.

I don’t know if outward facing poems have any effect on anything. But, if I don’t write them, I don’t feel like I’m being honest — or ethical — as an artist. But I would say exactly the same thing if I did not write personal poems. So I try to combine the two. One quick example: my poem “America, I Do Not Call Your Name without Hope.” That poem is really a poem “about” parenting anxieties in the time of school shootings and police violence. I wrote it after the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and I was thinking about America’s violent past. However, the poem was published in The San Francisco Chronicle three days after the 2016 presidential election and has now come to be seen as an anti-authoritarian/anti-Trump poem. The personal morphed into the historical then into the political.

In “Still Life with Absolution,” I just wanted to drop any persona, any poetry mask, and speak directly. In fact, rather than confessing to a priest, I wanted to confess to the reader. This sort of intimacy makes me very nervous. But I feel like readers appreciate candor. Plus, so much of our world is performance. I wanted the opposite of that. 

KARAN

Your poem “Uncertain Self-Portrait” engages with classical mythology and the ambiguity of hope. As a professor and poet, how do you see the relationship between scholarship and creative writing? Does your academic work inform your poetic practice?

DEAN

Great question. 

So, this poem is a direct result of my sons’ fascination with the Percy Jackson series. When they were younger, we listened to his books to and from school every day. My youngest still keeps Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods and Percy Jackson’s Greek Myths on autoplay on his iPad. 

I studied Latin in college, and re-experiencing these myths now, reminds me of reading them then, when I was so young. I remember at eighteen being impressed by their wisdom. Last year, my wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer, and the prognosis was beyond grim. I wanted to explore the deep complications and implications if the final “gift” (read: punishment) god gave humans was hope. 

KARAN

Death and the dead appear frequently in these poems — in “Visitation” they arrive “like an ocean / without wave.” Is death an inevitable subject for a poet? What is it about death that is so deeply appealing to us? Also, has fatherhood influenced how you think and write about death?

DEAN

Oh, absolutely. 

Being a father has changed my thoughts and feelings about death. No question. But so has losing both of my parents. Before the Borderless began, really, with the death of my father. And then, just as the book was going into production, my mother died of COVID-19. I mean, that project is literally bookended by death.

My wife’s diagnosis has been life-altering as well. I just can’t seem to escape it.

I write about death, I think, in order to come to terms with it. To be at peace with it. Perhaps to make it a poem I’m not so afraid to enter.

KARAN

Your use of white space and line breaks, particularly in poems like “Landscape” and “Self-Portraits: A Triptych” seems very deliberate. How do you approach the visual aspects of your poems? Does your work with visual art influence your decisions about form on the page? More generally, do you concern yourself with form? How do you know what shape a poem would/must take?

DEAN

This is probably the question I am asked the most. And it is a good one. An important one.

As I say above, I always see a poem before I read it. I think of poems first and foremost as visual texts. I want them to communicate as something being seen before they communicate as something being read. I feel like we see with our heart and read with our head. I want your heart to be quickened so your brain is more eager to follow.

Often, I am trying to find a form that is a visual manifestation of what I’m wanting the poem to accomplish sonically, rhythmically, and even thematically. I will almost always try out a poem in 3-5 different forms — stanzas, prose, something vertical, something scattered across the page. In Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, I was obsessed with long couplets. In Before the Borderless, I was thinking of the page as a canvas and was interested in a lot of negative space. The poems featured here are kind of a throwback to my first book Works & Days. I’m really digging them. Thanks for responding to them! 

KARAN

As both a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor at the University of San Francisco, and someone who has published so many critically acclaimed books over the years, what advice would you offer to emerging writers?

DEAN

Oof. The second most common question I’m asked.

Wow. I guess I would offer a series of both large and small advices: 

• Trust your voice.

• Don’t let anyone tell you what kind of writer you are.

• Read way more (and way more widely) than you are tempted to do.

• Rejections are part of being a writer. They should be a source of pride not dejection. Reginald Shepherd once told me he expected 300 rejections for every acceptance. This was likely hyperbole but not by much. Rejections only tell you about how one editor or one group of people reacted to your work at a specific time on a specific day in a specific context. They don’t tell you what work your poem might do on a different day with different people in a different context. 

• Expect nothing from writing except more writing. 

KARAN

Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

DEAN

Well, I’m really interested in ekphrastic poems right now, so my prompt is to write an ekphrastic poem. An ekphrastic poem is a poem about any piece of visual art. That could be a painting, a photograph, an NFT, a sculpture, a work of environmental art, an installation, etc. 

I tend to think that there are a few different types of ekphrastic poetry. 

• Description: This is a poem that pretty much just describes what is happening in a work of art. Think of William Carlos Williams’ poem about Icarus. See if your poem can do more than simply describe. 

• Persona: This is a poem that is spoken by a character in a painting, photograph, or sculpture. A good example is this poem by Keith S. Wilson or this poem by Paul Tran. 

• Persona/Artist. This is a different kind of persona poem - one spoken by the artist. I think Monica Youn's "Quinta del Sordo" might be spoken by Goya. 

• Political: This is a poem that either mimics the politics of a specific artwork or uses the themes and gestures of a work of art to make a political statement. 

• Autobiographical: This poem explores how a specific work of art makes the poet feel. It explores what the artwork means to the poet. Think of Robert Hayden's poem about Monet's Waterlillies. He says almost nothing about the painting except what it means to him. 

• Historical: This is a poem that considers the time period of the artwork and perhaps also the historical and political forces shaping the artwork or that affected the artist. I’m thinking of  “Summer Storm” by Charles Wright. 

• Formal homage: This is a poem that tries, formally, to sort of replicate or copy the artwork but in poem form. Consider my good friend Victoria Chang's poem in response to Agnes Martin.

Try to do on the page what your painting or photo or drawing does on the canvas (or your sculpture does on its pedestal, etc). That is, try to make the FORM of your poem similar to the FORM of your artwork.

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you think everyone should experience.

DEAN

Oh wow — what pressure! I think Cy Twombly is underrated. I’d encourage everyone to check out Twombly’s work. The Cy Twombly Foundation has put together a good Website that features his paintings (awesome), drawings (my favorite), sculptures, photographs, and prints. To me, he is America’s most writerly artist. Seeing his masterpiece, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), in person, is one of the great experiences of my life. 

KARAN

Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would love to know which poets have influenced you most throughout your career.

DEAN

When I was in college, it was W. S. Merwin, James Wright, Charles Wright, Sharon Olds, Langston Hughes, Mark Strand, Anna Akhmatova, Georg Trakl, Pablo Neruda. In graduate school I fell hard for Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke and Federico Garcia Lorca and Cesar Vallejo. Then I discovered Indigenous poets like Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Luci Tapahonso, Wendy Rose, Janice Gould, LeAnne Howe, and many others who have become very important to me. I think Louise Erdrich is an underappreciated poet. One interesting switch is that when I was younger, I was firmly in the Walt Whitman camp, but in the last 20 years or so, I’ve moved solidly to Emily Dickinson. I think she is a genius way way way ahead of her time.