Dunce & Dusty: Part Two
Continued from part one.
6
Dunce Apprentice: Tell me a question you’d like me to ask you.
Dusty Rose: [Long pause.] Oh, that’s a good one. I wish I had a really good answer off the top of my head but I’m actually gonna have to think about that for a second. I… think that I’d like to talk about how audiences respond to my work. And, one-on-one, what people say to me after a show, and who speaks to me because on the road, I found out that… I thought it was kind of interesting that, consistently, that the people who wanted to talk to me after a show about my work were either very young women… the under-20 women crowd, or middle-aged women. I don’t actually meet that many women my age. I think they hide them all inside of marriage and baby-making [Dunce laughs], unfortunately. But yeah, middle-aged women and very young women, which I think has something to do with empowerment? I think as very young women we’re seeking and actively looking for ways to be empowered and confident and wholly ourselves, and then, as middle-aged women I think that there is a revisiting of that, where women are looking again going, “Wait a minute. So I did all this stuff that I’m supposed to do and now I’m still a person and I still need to recognize that.” And for whatever reason… I don’t think it’s particularly me, because I’m like, you know, crusty pixie dressed like a boy on stage. I think that middle-aged women identify with me particularly, but I think that my work in some way speaks to them, because I do a lot of writing about… finding freedom and finding personal power, I think, you know… like “Marry Mean” is about my mother’s journey through drug-abuse and self-hate into a more peaceful place, and “Riler” and “Warning Label” are pieces that follow my journey from being miserable and married to seeking what I really want out of myself. So I think there’s something out of my work that for some reason speaks to women who are looking at some sort of self-actualization and empowerment. And it was, like, so consistent that I kind of felt the need to comment on it. Dudes never talk to me about my poems, is what I’m saying. Dudes never talk to me about my poems… unless it’s like [adopts frank male voice], “I like that one, ‘Deb Gets Fucked’.. [Laughs.] You know?
Dunce: Everyone asks for that fuckin’ poem, man.
Dusty: I’m so tired of that fuckin’ poem. So tired.
Dunce: [To table:] Did everyone hear that?
Dusty: I’m so tired of “Deb Gets Fucked,” man. [Laughs.] I understand why it’s a signature piece… I talk about sex and polyamory and whatever. Um, but, yeah….
7
Dusty: Are there more cool questions?
Dunce: There’s all kinds of questions, but they’re all scrawled like across each other…. That’s some hardcore rough-drafting. What would you do if you were rendered dumb and could no longer speak a poem?
Dusty: I am pretty certain that I would continue to write…and I would probably hand my poems to Baraka Noel and be like: “Can you perform this for me?” Because as collaborative artistic partners, one of the things we did to, uh, hear a poem in new and positive ways was to read it to each other. You write some new shit and you’re not sure if it’s any good, you let the other person read it to you, and all of the sudden you’re like, “Oh, that’s a dope poem I just wrote!” And also we do a lot of work with performing each other’s pieces and I always like the way my stuff sounds… I usually like the way my stuff sounds when he performs it. I mean, if it wasn’t Baraka, I would request that another poet consistently cover me, and I’d make that… I don’t care, I don’t care if they’re slamming it, I don’t care if [inaudible], I need my words to be heard. They’re not meant to be read. I’ve tried to explore that, and I’m gonna have a chap book sometimes or whatever, but I’m not writing stuff that’s supposed to be read… only. It’s just not. Not how I write. I’m a performer. Always have been. I admit it. I admit it, alright! [Laughs.] Grant, you are a god and I love you. Also, thanks for the whiskey…. [To Dunce:] What would you do?
Dunce: It doesn’t always just come out. I do know that eventually I’m gonna have to write about it. It won’t always be right away. Eventually, I’m gonna have to write about it, otherwise, it just won’t be dealt with. So for me, sometimes I go through phases where I’m not writing, like recently, I was like, in and out of Florida for a year… I haven’t been writing that much. And I feel like, if that continues, I’m gonna have some self-hate issues.
Dusty: Yeah. You can’t not write.
Dunce: You can’t not write! I’m gonna eventually have self-hate issues. I like, stopped writing for two years and like… got a little suicidal.
Dusty: The most crazy, upsetting parts of my life – I wasn’t writing. And I don’t want to paint writing as, like, this auto-therapy kinda thing. I hope it’s more than that.
Dunce: Is it a form of closure?
Dusty: I think it’s more… when I’m not writing and performing, I feel very isolated so it’s a way of having community and connecting to my community. It’s been when I’ve been most isolated that I haven’t been doing my art, essentially, and when I am engaging artistically I’m also engaging with other people. Usually artists, but, you know…
Dunce: I feel like it’s connected to wanting to be remembered. In whatever way – whether it’s like, having your seed planted or having someone remember who you are, or whatever it is to have a staple in the community where it’s carried on and someone remembers you. Isn’t that a small part of it?
Dusty: I think, on a related note, it has to do with being understood in some way? I’m an awkward duck, man. I’m not that good at connecting to people just by talking to them all the time. I’m good at making people feel connected to me – I’ll listen a lot. Which it doesn’t seem like now, ‘cause I’m supposed to be talking a lot. [Laughs.] When I meet new people, they don’t usually end the conversation knowing much about me. It’s through my poems that I’m most honest and most transparent, and that’s the place to learn some shit about me, man. Unless we have trust… real trust… my poems are the best way to get at me, and I kind of need that to form and maintain a connective community.
Dunce: I guess in the end, it’s relating to other people.
Dusty: Right?
Dunce: So, if I went deaf, dumb, and… just couldn’t say shit… I guess I would have pull the same stunt you did, to like, have it out. Until people understand what I’m saying.
Dusty: I don’t know where I heard this? It must have been in a movie or a poem.… I can’t remember where this is from, but the question posed in the scenario that I saw, heard, read, whatever, was: “What if you were not only dumb, but unable to write, unable to speak, unable to communicate your poetry in any way. How would you respond to that?” The person said, “I would blow my brains out, so people could just see what was inside my head.” I was like, “That was really beautiful and brilliant.”
Dunce: I feel like that. I feel when I’m not writing, I’m becoming part of like, a giant, indistinguishable blob in a community.
Dusty: I feel a little like a zombie when I’m not creating, yeah.
Dunce: [Knowing laugh.] Yeah.
Dusty: I don’t know so much about the connection to self-hate, necessarily. I guess circumstantially it’s there. For sure, I feel like I’m not real… I don’t exist anymore, very much. You’re most alive when you’re on the mic, spitting a poem for the first time. Like, “I just memorized this shit. This is the first time I’ve spit this piece… and an audience is hearing it. That’s the moment that we live for, right? Over and over.”
Dunce: Also, do not get that confused with the guy who’s like, [droll voice] “I wrote this in the car on the way here…”
Dusty: No man! It’s like, “I’ve been trying to push this.” The first time I spit “Motherfucker #3,” when that poem is actually finished… I’ve been trying to write this poem for two years.
Dunce: Right.
Dusty: That is gonna be a powerful moment, and I’m gonna be like, “What!”
Dunce: Sometimes you look at a poem after a year, that you haven’t been able to really finish, and you go, “You! I’m gonna finish you today.”
Dusty: And they don’t stop. When a poem is like, “Write me! Write me!” They don’t stop until they come out, man.
8
Dunce: I’m getting further away from relating to my own poems, but other people are responding to them more, which is kind of…it’s like… really upsetting.
Dusty: I think that there’s a little bit of oscillation to be allowed for. So for instance, my first writing – I just wrote it. First word to last… that’s what I wrote and I’m done with it. No editing. And then I moved into this phase where I was growing as a writer, and therefore trying to do things that I didn’t really know how to do yet, which means that you like, try and fail, try and fail… and that’s a lot of editing and changing, and working out. And then you develop a personality as a writer, a style that’s more your own. At some point you wind down to being able to write a piece that doesn’t need quite so much editing, that you feel satisfied with. But when you grow, that’s what happens. There’s a lot of editing. It’s more frustrating and less satisfying, but like… I think that that’s a thing that you move through multiple times.
Dunce: I feel like I’ve got to get past that point soon, because what happens with me – pieces like “The Fallen,” works like that, it’s, “I’m intentionally going to write a story based on someone else’s style of writing stories. Do the storytelling thing.” Or writing “Stars.” – “I’m going to try and have this consistent idea.” Or “Monocle”? All those things are not – They don’t mean anything to me, really. It’s like, “I’m trying to do this thing. I accept it. And people relate to it.” But then when I try to implement the skills that I’ve leaned into a poem that actually means something to me?
Dusty: It’s hard…. I think we were doing pretty similar things when you were writing “Stars” and I was writing “Absalom.” It’s a series of thoughts that are like… kind of meaningful. But it’s not telling a story. And it’s not relating any sort of real experience that I feel. I mean, there are experiences inside of that poem that are very important to me, but the ways that the audience connects with that poem have nothing to do with what the piece means to me. And also it’s this sort of theme – for me, Biblical references, for you, astronomical references in “Stars” – that’s kind of meaningless. It’s a tool.
Dunce: Yeah. It’s like, my cliché poem.
Dusty: Yeah, definitely. Although I think that maybe I have a little more connection to “Absalom” than you do to “Stars.” You were saying shit about life in general, which is why people connect to it, and I was saying some shit about some personal experiences. It’s more of a necklace than a story. It’s some stuff that’s strung together, and kind of goes with each other, but it’s beads.
Dunce: It’s extremes of images that are related, but only because they build images in your head that look the same? They don’t have to do with the same story.
Dusty: And you know that people connect to cliché shit….
Dunce: What’s fun is we’ve done that a couple times, and people didn’t know it wasn’t a poem!
Dusty: So, we played this game on the road, ‘cause we at some point had to recognize that the places where people connected or thought they connected or understood, or were most affected by our work were when we were being the most cliché. The least original. The least creative. After we recognized that, we decided to write the most cliché poem ever, so we brainstormed a list of cliché ideas and images and words, whatever. And then Dunce just like, read the list aloud and it was hilarious, because it sounded like a slam poem. If you didn’t listen too carefully, it sounded like a poem.
Grant Valdes: Will somebody like, perform it?
Dunce: It’s just cliché words with linking words in between. It doesn’t matter what they are. So…
Dusty: [In dramatic slam voice:] My heart sits on the ocean waves under the moon, waiting for you.
Dunce: [In dramatic slam voice:] In the sky… I flew… on clouds softer than anything I could have imagined. My heart’s dripping. Bud-a-boom… I remember.
Dusty: Wondering if you would ever come find me again, I walked along the beach, like Jesus… like my father did along this sand, leaving my footprints for you to find.
Dunce: Like my father – back to Afrika! Afrika! Afrika! [Laughs.]
Dusty: Right, and so we would just play with phrases that you hear over and over again in poems, of phrases that people are going to like [zealous voice], “Yeah!” about. And we started playing this game on stage. We called it, “My Third Eye Smells Apple Pie” or “Chicken.”
Dunce: I like, “My Third Eye Smells Chicken.”
Dusty: Depending on who was performing. Um… and… the really upsetting thing that happened… We didn’t explain the game beforehand… the audience would assume it was a really good poem. And it would be with us. We would have to stop. What we ended up doing to clarify the game is we would stop the poet in the middle, and throw out a couple of really obvious clichés, like, “Hey, could you throw a ‘heart’ in there? And maybe like, ‘God’?”
Dunce: “We need a ‘rose’!”
Dusty: “And ‘hands.’ A ‘rose petal.’ And ‘blood.’ We need some ‘blood.’” And then the poet would throw those lines in in very transparent ways. Sometimes, audiences would get it… sometimes, we hope… but yeah, they didn’t really notice. Which told us we were right: Audiences will connect most strongly with our most cliché moments. Which is painful, but also very useful in writing.
Dunce: Even after shows, people would be like, “What was that poem you did about…”
Dusty: “…The heart and the ocean? And blood on the thorns?” And it’s like, “That’s a really hard question to answer, actually.”
Dunce: “I’m sorry, that doesn’t exist.”
Dusty: “I was just sayin’ some cliché things. Sorry.”
Dunce: “I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad.”
Dusty: Right? We weren’t originally. Before we discovered what was happening, we weren’t trying to be deceptive.
Dunce: We want to be deceptive. It’s like, half of our trick.
9
Dusty: We’ve played a lot with making audiences uncomfortable.
Dunce: It works!
Dusty: It does, right? Because it disarms people when you jerk ‘em around a little and don’t let ‘em have what they expect. They become a lot more able to listen honestly and really be a part of the piece of art, rather than some sort of distant, judgmental audience. If you’re breaking all of their expectations over and over, in ways they can’t really predict, then you’re breaking down that defensive wall they have, and they have to engage with you. They have to be responsive and be a part of what you’re doing.
Dunce: One of the ways I liked was when, if we had an audience who didn’t want to accept that they were part of the show… I don’t like that. With our show, you are part of the show, and you need to respond, otherwise, I’m gonna get bored and you’re gonna get bored. And then no one’s gonna be happy.
Dusty: Right?
Dunce: So what I’m gonna do is, if you don’t seem like you’re responding now, you don’t get the rest of it. If I’m doing something that’s really dope, I’m gonna stop, and I’m gonna tell you that I’m gonna stop. And I stopped because you’re being lame. What you need to do is respond.
Dusty: Comedians know this trick! If you insult the audience, they frickin’ love you. You gotta be mean to them. Audiences like it when you’re mean. If you’re nice, then they’ll be mean to you, as the performer. I don’t know what this thing is, but you’ve gotta be a little bit mean to your audience. You gotta make fun of them.
Dunce: It’s like the streets! Can’t be nice. They’ll just walk all over you! Take you for a fool!
Dusty: And there are ways to do it more subtly than we did [Dunce laughs]. For instance, I had a show with Franco at Brainwash. He’s a really sweet poet… beautiful poems, a lot of love things. Really sweet person. Very soft-spoken. He’s gonna be our feature, and I’m like, “He’s not gonna be mean enough to these people, so I’m gonna have to do it for him.” I got to introduce him, so what I did was I chose the three most vulgar, upsetting poems that I had, with the most swear words and sex references. And I told them, “You’re about to get something really sweet. So right now, you’re gonna get all the salt from me, bitches, so listen the fuck up.” I just said really dirty things for six minutes, which I will do on occasion. But I also punctuated it with some commentary on my own poems, like “Fuck you guys. Listen the fuck up!” And they did. And my feature got to say his beautiful, sweat, heartbreaking poems.
Dunce: They like to be messed up. That’s the most important thing, I feel like.
Dusty: I think it has to do with human nature. This is getting a little bit out there, into the realm of theory, but let’s say I meet someone new. I’m in Seattle tomorrow morning. I’m out for coffee, and I’m talking with a stranger. And I really want to form a connection with this person? I don’t do it by politely having conversation for the next hour. I say, “Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” And if it works – if I can drag them out of that coffee shop on some random-ass adventure to, say, Goodwill down the street, and convince them to try on ridiculous galoshes until we’re doing something completely out of their comfort zone, then suddenly we’re buddies.
Dunce: That’s what it is!
Dusty: But I was a little bit mean to get there.
Dunce: I’m gonna do a show. You know I’m gonna do a show. Everybody gets onstage and they do a show. You know that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m trying to take you somewhere! I’m trying to make you try on these galoshes! You’ve gotta be paying attention.
10
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“Listen Mr. Levantini” by Dusty Rose
“Lights” by Dunce Apprentice
“Consecration” by Dusty Rose
“The Mainstream” by Dunce Apprentice
Dunce & Dusty: Part One
1
Grant Valdes: Check.
Dunce Apprentice: So, we’re on the clock now?
Grant: Please describe the room for the people at home…
Dunce: Does “money” work? It’s very nice.
Dusty Rose: I really don’t like this room. It’s always irritated me. We’re in the Spitfire – it’s like a restaurant and bar. There are really high ceilings with like, exposed air duct system shit going on, and these pieces of art that are kind of… upsetting? Poverty chic?
Dunce: I don’t know about that. Also, there’s a giant door you walk into, which makes you feel like you’re entering the gates of Hell.
Dusty: The door is really huge. There’s a really high ceiling.
Dunce: And I don’t feel like I should be here – or a person that is supposed to be here.
Dusty: Yeah, I just feel really out of place here. And the tables are like, kind of nice, but not nice enough that I feel like the staff in gonna treat me nice even though I don’t look like I have money – you know what I mean? There’s like that level of nice restaurant where …
Dunce: “We’ll treat you nice, anyway”
Dusty: “No matter what, cause we’re that good.” And then there’s like, “This place is too expensive for you. Fuck off. Sit in back. Drink your coffee.” That’s where we are.
Dunce: “I know you’re not gonna buy anything.” I mean, we we’re not gonna buy anything, either.
Dusty: I told her.
Dunce: That’s fine. We both understand that.
Dusty: Also, we’re drinking whiskey and coffee. And there are lots of journals on the table.
Dunce: [Laughs.] And shattered pieces of paper. Anyway… Alright.
2
Dunce: What is the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard?
Dusty: I think… it’s gotta be a small river.. like a brook in the morning. You know that burbley sound? It has to be like in the morning… and you wake up near it… I think that.. burbley water in the morning… definitely the most beautiful sound that I’ve ever heard. It’s always been a really peaceful place for me. My first thought was my mom playing guitar. That’s, admittedly, a really beautiful sound… I think that running water in the woods is slightly more effective.
Dunce: I like burbley water. If I wake up to it, it makes me think my bathtub is overflowing, though. [Dusty laughs.] Now… why do you write?
Dusty: For the most part… why I write at all is because like, I can’t not write. It’s something that I do like, you know, it feels a little bit a like a bodily function. I can’t really help myself. Um… it just sort of comes out. [Laughs.] No, for real, when I feel the urge to write something down, I obsess over it until I get a pen or pencil to paper. That’s all I think about. Um, but that’s really not all there is to writing for me at this point in my life. That’s why I write anything, even bad poems and journal entries. But at this point in my life, writing a poem is a long… arduous process, because I’m writing competitive slam poetry, so it’s three-minute monstrosities with a climax. You know, for portions and moments, and lots of editing and cutting, and that sort of thing. I guess one reason I’m doing that is because I’m a competitive poet and I want to be successful in the slam community. It exposes me to other poets and allows me to travel. Sometimes, it makes money and it… mostly exposes me to people who can help me be a better poet and performer. It gains me access to more and more competent coaches and poets. And the other reason is that, the more carefully crafted a piece of work is, the more effective it is at connecting to an audience, and forming connections with my audiences, affecting them in some way is the whole reason I speak my poems, rather than just writing them out, getting them out and, you know, setting them aside. I need to be connecting with people through my art and the more work I put into a poem, the more, the better it’s gonna happen. Some really poorly-phrased shit right there, but whatever. [Laughs.]
Dunce: It’s so hard to gauge for me.. finding that space in between, you know?
Dusty: Word..
Dunce: Where is for you, where is for them. Yeah, Dusty Rose, that’s a hard place to be in. I think you maintain it much better than I do.
Dusty: Tell me more about that place – would you describe that?
Dunce: It’s just like… not only trying to write for other people to understand it, but also.. which kind of takes the images that I relate to heavily away from it..
Dusty: Oh… word… yeah… yeah… Like, “I’ve got some shit to say, and there’s the poem that I write that makes sense to me, and then…”
Dunce: The poem you hear.
Dusty: The poem that maybe would get my point across to my audience the most clearly but then there’s like that’s not really a piece of art, because it’s not the words that you know, makes sense to me. But the poem that I would write just for myself isn’t going to connect to anybody.
Dunce: Right…
Dusty: It’s my crazy thoughts. And finding that place in between where, whatever I’m trying to speak in that piece is still in there, but I’ve edited enough, or put it together enough that it’s going to like, speak to an audience. Yeah, that place is where I’m constantly trying to be.
Dunce: Yeah… there’s a lot of ways to deal with that.
3
Dunce: I want to ask the question we talked about before: How did things change during the tour, or like after the tour… whenever. Whenever you realized things changed?
Dusty: The tour was like, really… other than, like, my first six to eight months of slamming, which is like, really just some time when I’m figuring out that really, I am a poet, like it’s my first three or four poems… um… So the tour was kind of the first year of my development as a serious writer and performer. And so my writing and my performance and my relationship to my art has changed dramatically, like… the poems that I had started out with at the beginning of the tour were… I don’t want to say “clumsy”… I still speak some of them. I still say “Pixie Dust” , which is some shit I was writing at the beginning of our nine-month tour but, um, they became much more personal pieces.
Dunce: That was really pushed hard during the tour, I feel like. That was something we all had to kind of jump into doing.
Dusty: Yeah… it’s pretty standard for your first wave of work to be really personal work, cause you’ve got some stuff to say about yourself, right? And you’ve gotta get that out before it seems important to talk about anything else in the world, like, you’ve got things to share about yourself. And also, that’s some of your most powerful work, because if you’re speaking your own experience, then you’re really opening doorways for people to connect with you. I think that I have been… my first work that I started the tour with.. I was doing a lot of imitation of other performance poets, and you can kind of see that in my work. I sound like a slam poet in some pretty cliché ways… um…which was really useful at the time. And then, I think my work moved into a phase where I was like… I mean, we kind of entered this phase together. We were like: “We are now gonna win slams instead of just like being poets who write random artistic shit, we want to be connecting with audiences in real and tangible ways which make them give us good scores.” Um.. because we were entering several competitions in a row and so, I worked on my writing in a more, I want to say holistic way where I looked at like, how the first few lines of my poem… where it would take my audience. And was it actually… rather than being what I had in mind artistically, were the first few lines of my poem taking my audience to the mindset that I needed them to be in to listen to the rest of my poem. And to, you know, have an effective climax that, um, put my audience both emotionally and mentally in a place where I wanted them to be. And was my closing memorable? Also, did it feel good? Was it uncomfortable or awkward? I was looking at the poem as the whole entity in a whole new way. And also, I think that I have streamlined my language a lot. As in, I’m not using the SAT words anymore…
Dunce: Yeah…
Dusty: Which is a good thing. [Both laugh.] Because I think that there’s a lot more grace and possibility with simpler language, which I’ve learned from Caitlin Meissner.
Dunce: Man…
Dusty: She’ll ill, right?
Dunce: Yeah.
Dusty: I’m learning a lot reading her work.
Dunce: Let’s take her on tour.
Dusty: I told her – I was like, “you’re getting in my car, girl.” And I think that since the tour has ended… I had a serious case of writer’s block at the end of the tour. I hadn’t written in months when we got back to San Francisco, and I hadn’t wanted to. I was a little bit… unhappy. Or at least stressed out. And not really able to engage with my art. And after I settled into chilling in San Fransco, and having a job, and actually, say, sleeping every now and then [laughing]… found a better mind state, I started writing again, and… I felt like I needed to be writing anything. I didn’t care if it was good, I didn’t care if it was a slam poem, I didn’t even care if it was a poem, I just needed to be writing something, and so I really opened the door and just writing stuff. And what I think came out is a couple of pretty ill poems that, like, maybe are not my typical slam poems… but I feel like if I slam that shit about San Francisco, it’s kind of dark and maybe a little bit obscure? I feel like if I slam that really hard, it’s gonna mess up some people’s heads, man. I think I’m like moving through this phase where I can write an effective slam piece, but it’s not quite the art I want it to be… and also I can write a poem that achieves the message, and the words, and the sound I want to have, but it’s not a slam poem. And then there’s that poem that will both speak to an audience and be the art that you want it to be, and that’s a really hard place to find, that’s why I admire people like Caitlin Meissner and Anna Szmakani and, freaking… I don’t know, who else? Saul Williams. And that other guy. There are other people I admire. Tara Hardy.
4
Dunce: I was just gracefully handed a piece of paper, which reminded me of Saul Williams. Are you speaking in poetry all the time? We talked about… Baraka [Noel] would talk about me being like Saul Williams, like Ainsley Burroughs. Everything they said was poetry. Just in casual conversation. Everything they said was like, “What came out of your mouth? I couldn’t even think of something that deep…”
Dusty: I’ve been accused of talking like I got poems in my mouth, sometimes. I also frequently make a really conscious effort to speak very casually, to use improper grammar and slang, so that I will be understood, and so that I won’t be accused of talkin’ like a book. Some days that doesn’t feel good. No, for real, my choices about language are pretty deliberate, and if I … I guess I do speak… speak… like I’ve been saying a poem a lot… I don’t think it’s all the time, though. I make some pretty deliberate choices to not…
5
Grant: There’s a piece of poetry I want you to respond to.
Dusty: Ok. So the piece of poetry is…. [Starts reading… laughs.] I feel like I should share this:
“In getting up here I say it is the best road trip in America.… Soaring though nature’s finest show. Denali, the Great One, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice-fogged frigid beauty. The cold, though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime — such extreme summertime — about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago — than just some months from now — with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.”
That was Governor Sarah Palin’s resignation speech. [Laughs all around]. It’s actually kind of interesting that some… many of the tools that I use as a poet, such as parallel structure, repetition, and um… even the alliteration, the [adopts slam voice] “The ice-fogged frigid beauty,” and the things that we do with sound and rhythm. I mean, the same tools that you use in writing an actually good speech, not that I’m claiming that this is one… there are some really similar tools in public speaking, in speech-writing and poetry. It’s just that they’re a hammer in a speech and they’re used like a needle and thread in poetry. Yay, similes. This was really painful, actually [laughs]. There was some really heavy-handed repetition and parallel structure, like… the natural images are so simplistic and boring and idealistic and… I don’t know. Cliché. That was actually really painful. Thank you. Thank you for that, Sarah Palin. That was a little embarrassing. I’m glad she’s not, um, doing anything important right now.
Dunce: I don’t know how much time we have…I know I’m out of whiskey.
Dusty: Ha!
Grant: Alright, I’ll get another round.
Dusty: What?
Dunce: Oh, no, that was just a reference to the Ladies’ Man and his Courvoisier.
Grant: Oh. I haven’t seen it.
Continued in part two.
“My Dream Girl Don’t Exist”
By Tom Doggett
I am enamored with a woman I have never met. She has been dead for a hundred and fifty years. She is a poet, and her name is Emily Dickinson.
Every winter, as the nights grow long, the dull hue of my walls drive me to revisit her poetry at length. I pick up her complete collection, a volume of one thousand seven hundred seventy five poems. The hard cover, stripped of its paper jacket, is blank, and its color is so dull that my walls seem snow white by comparison.
With most books, one bookmark suffices. With this, I need several. I keep ticket stubs and scratch paper jammed between important pages; right now there are three such holders of place.
I did not choose this fate. I think infatuation is dangerous, but as happens with all infatuation, I cannot help it. The winter brings grey skies of melancholy, and Emily Dickinson soothes me. She provokes me to think very deeply, but not strenuously, and the rhythm of her lines taps through my body as if it were my heartbeat. She helps me sleep soundly and dream in nascent Technicolor.
The true Emily Dickinson is not visible through the oval-shaped daguerreotypes that survive her countenance. These images show a shy, homely woman who didn’t get much sun. Her lips are slightly pursed, and her large eyes sink deep in her head. Her hair is unnaturally straight and even. But beyond these details lies something dormant, a “still – Volcano – Life –.” Something dances behind her eyes, and her lips seem in motion mid-pout.
Her soul is only visible through her poems, and it is not just visible but perceptible – accessible through a range of senses. When I look at her picture, her poems are what make the eyes extra-dimensional. Through the poems I know her, the inner self that sighs and smiles underneath the faintly amused but stoic countenance of the picture. I will never know her manner of speaking or walking, but I understand the tone of her thoughts, the activity of her mind when her door was closed and the house quiet. For a poet to convey herself so thoroughly is rare, and Emily Dickinson does so with great and intense beauty.
I have perhaps spent too much time wandering the aisles of literature’s cultural memory. In this time, have never read someone so intimate as Emily Dickinson. This shouldn’t be a surprise to me: her biography is one of extreme intimacy, the story of a room-bound poet whose life of solitude was self-imposed and fruitful. She was disengaged from the world that bore her; her Amherst community knew her as a hermit, someone who didn’t trifle with fancies. They also knew nothing of the great depth of her mind.
Emily Dickinson was profoundly unconcerned with the mundane aspects of the world. The friendships she cultivated were intense, and evidence suggests that she was so emotionally demanding that she drove her friends away. Her romantic interests were unsustainable – she drove men away too, surely because she didn’t care to hide what burned inside of her. I imagine that to sit in her parlor, hand in hand with the eligible Ms. Dickinson, was unbearable to the 19th century suitor who expected deference and demureness. Instead, he faced the fury of emotions laid bare.
I doubt that she would have balked if a nice young man desired her in marriage. But luckily, that man never came, because Emily Dickinson was not suited for a life of domesticity. Her mind was too vast and artful to be wasted matching curtains and aligning placemats. She needed to engage herself with the nature of her spirit and the beauty of the earth around her. She needed to consider the warm shiver that raw emotion brings, and the limitless mystery of death’s climactic return.
Where other poets generalize, Emily Dickinson specifies. She describes, in exactly the words that strike her most deeply, the verbal meaning her feelings carry. Her poems strip away the pretenses of this world, the bothersome simplifications and routines, to reveal what lies most near our centers. She has great insight into the climaxes – sexual and creative, joyful and anguished – that mark our lives. She also examines what lingers as our minds fray and distort their memories.
That she is able to do this shows not only enlightenment but also bravery. She could understand so well because rather than running away from her own emotions, she stayed with them. She let them drag her right up to the “white heat.” When the moment began to fade, when consciousness began re-patching the quilt of reality, she peered back at the moment of impact. She approached existence the way everyone should and no one does – she grasped every emotion curiously, not melodramatically, and turned it over slowly in her hand. She didn’t allow feeling, that rare human gift, to escape her full perception. So, because she was never far from her pen, her poems reach terrifying places.
Here is an example – a poem I quoted briefly above, in its entirety:
A still – Volcano – Life –
That flickered in the night –
When it was dark enough to do
Without erasing sight –
A quiet – Earthquake Style –
Too subtle to suspect
By natures this side Naples –
The North cannot detect
The Solemn – Torrid – Symbol –
The lips that never lie –
Whose hissing Corals part – and shut –
And Cities – ooze away
I am probably wrong, but I think this poem is about having an orgasm. Regardless, the ferocity of the words as they’re strung together is breathtaking: the pace and the imagery are revelatory and confounding. The poem is a riddle. But not a riddle in the traditional sense – it is guileless. We can take meaning from it as we wish. It is magnificently vivid, yet subtle enough that it can give anyone the gratification of understanding. And despite its open-ended nature, its vast and varied significances do not preclude the possibility for true meaning. It is a riddle for people with time to spend thinking; it will never exhaust its potential. As we grow, and words like “torrid” and “hissing” gain new personal meaning, the experience of reading this poem will be reinvigorated. We may begin to understand the volcano metaphor as it relates to human experience. It is all there for the taking, put down many years ago for our deliberation.
Broadly put, the subject of this poem (#601) is the tremors that are so powerful that they must be submerged. These tremors could be sobs of grief held in for propriety’s sake. They could be the shudders of a terrible realization, swallowed by the flesh before they can betray anything. She could, of course, be talking about actual natural disasters. I can’t believe that, though, because nearly everything she wrote relates to the question of humanity.
The rhythm of the poem mimics the subject’s submerged potency. Ellipses chop up the first line of each stanza, which enforces pauses in the rhythm. The ellipses affect a stutter in the lines, a staggering rhythm that synergizes with the imagery of natural disasters. The lines without dashes are smoother in comparison. Their coasting rhythms are especially graceful because they follow the turbulent pauses of their predecessors. When read aloud, the rhythm animates the idea she intended: that calm surfaces often belie the turbulence beneath.
Meaning exists in this poem, but it isn’t very accessible. Emily Dickinson does not always try to capture the meaning. When what she is writing about is too complex to pare down to a single idea, she lets the poem embody the ambiguity. Some people might find this frustrating, but to me it is simply honest. She can’t elucidate what she can’t herself fully grasp.
When I attach a physical form to Ms. Dickinson, it takes shape jaggedly, in the dashes and fragmentary lines of her poetry. Just like the human frame, the physical shape and texture of her poems does little justice to the multitudes held within. At the same time, the grouped stanzas are themselves beautiful. They are dynamic; they demonstrate congruities and incongruities. They contain perfects rhythms and perfect rhymes, and in contrast, a clunky line and a dissonant rhythm, serving as a reminder of the relativity of beauty. An example:
A solemn thing – it was – I said –
A woman – white – to be –
And wear – if God should count me fit –
Her blameless mystery –
A hallowed thing – to drop a life
Into the purple well –
Too plummetless – that it return –
Eternity – until –
I pondered how the bliss would look –
And would it feel as big –
When I could take it in my hand –
As hovering – seen – through fog –
And then – the size of this “small” life –
The Sages – call it small –
Swelled – like Horizons – in my vest –
And I sneered – softly – “small”!
The cautious hiccups of the first two stanzas are awkward; the speaker seems unsure of her own thoughts. In the third, the hiccups dissolve into a moment when the speaker takes her bliss into her own hand. She begins to fathom her singular humanity, and she realizes that she alone possesses it. In the final two stanzas of the poem, the meter smoothes out, leading to a revelation in which the speaker’s humanity swells and exercises its full, autonomous capacity for existence. At the end, she scoffs at the “sages” who lack the clarity to acknowledge her multitudes.
And yes, in this poem the prescient Ms. Dickinson is prefiguring the feminist movement. She does so concisely, authoritatively, and elegantly – with a haughty sneer, she dismisses the expectations so unfairly placed on the women of her day. As a dismissal of the weight of cultural expectations, this moment is both lovely and tremendously potent. Most impressively, the speaker doesn’t need to assert herself to enjoy her individuality. She sneers softly, and this is the effect of the poem: a soft and private sneer. After all, the author didn’t shout her independence, she scribbled it, and she was content to leave it unread.
Emily Dickinson’s self-contentedness sometimes terrifies me. I cannot fathom such an existence, and my heart aches to think that she never received validation for her genius. The second stanza of this poem, though, makes me feel better. From it, I see that her poetry was the true validation. She cared so deeply about it that she found it sanctifying; there was honor in writing that she believed would carry her to immortality. In a way, it did. This is true art, as grave as it is beautiful.
The subject of Emily Dickinson comes up eerily often in my conversations. If I meet a woman named Emily, I can’t resist the urge to tell her that I am planning on naming my first daughter after Ms. Dickinson. Other times, she comes up more obliquely – a sight, a sound, a phrase, reminds me of something in a poem. The connection leaps from the recesses of my mind, and before I know it, I am reciting an entire six-stanza poem to my newest acquaintance.
Invariably, these displays evoke bewilderment on the part of my acquaintance. The moderately educated American mind believes Emily Dickinson to be a depressing Puritan hermit. Perhaps a particularly morbid selection from someone’s freshman year emboldens this perception. Thus, the inevitable question is: “Why? Why do you love her so much?”
I have explained myself many times, and the word I keep returning to is “grace.” Using her natural poetic inclination, Emily Dickinson manages to elucidate her experience at the end of consciousness, a place most humans avoid confronting. And although she writes about the grandest, darkest things that tug on her soul, she never wastes a word, and the words she chooses explode with meaning.
When grouped together in stanzas, the words harmonize into a rhythm that is at once elegant and loose. There is another dimension to her poetry, a strange realm where form and meaning marry to create something altogether reminiscent of ourselves. Her poems are animated and moody; they hum with the vibrations of human capriciousness. This is grace – a palpable, living sense of beauty.
In a letter to her only publisher, Emily Dickinson once said:
“If I can read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
I don’t really think there is.
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