Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of The Shining (Wave Books) and editor of Essays (Essays Press). Lasky is also co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013) and a 2013 Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. A new book of prose, MEMORY (Semiotext(e)), is forthcoming later this year.. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in New York City.
The Shining, Dorothea Lasky’s latest collection, is a paean and feminist reimagination of Stanley Kubrick’s eponymous adaptation and of Stephen King’s novel. In The Shining’s poems of self portraiture, personas, and ekphrasis, restraint on bodily freedom becomes as literal as method acting was for the actress Shelley Duvall. Through color, shapes, and liquids, Lasky invites us into the snow maze made by the tension between artistic creation and freedom in a world keen to place the female poet-speaker under severe guidance. Lasky also edited Essays, an anthology of essays by Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre. The poet-essayists approach a profound truth through a subversion of canonical texts like the Bible, statutes, and mainstream history to show us a reality of when the shades are pulled down through a discursive form of writing and thinking.
Tiffany Troy: Essays began as a symposium you organized about the Poet’s Essay at Columbia in 2018. What excites me most about the essays featured is the sense that it looks to upstage tradition by putting at its center a narrative that is often ignored or marginalized in some way.
Tracie Morris writes “[b]etween poetry and manifesto is the essay.” What about the genre most excites you? How did you choose which poets to invite to the symposium: “More than a Manifesto: A Poet’s Essay”?
Dorothea Lasky: I’ve long been invested in subverting the essay form that often gets taught in American public schools–the 5 paragraph essay. I grew up on that form and was taught to mold my thinking to its structure. I feel that such a practice is a disservice to the imagination and to the possibility of language and thought, which arrives unwieldy. In my classes, I often ask students to write poet’s essays, which are not in service to such constrictions and can happen on their own terms. In the spirit of these ideas, I wanted to create a symposium to explore what the essay form could do in the hands of great poets. I chose each poet because I love their work, and I wanted to see what would happen when each of them was given the symposium’s prompt to write “a poet’s essay.” It was my hope that their essays could inspire students and poets everywhere.
TT: I am curious about the structure of the poet’s essay, which approaches its conclusion of questions through a litany of questions. Ken Chen wrote that syllogisms are unable to create moral value, while at the same time extending our comprehension. So I feel in some ways, the poet’s essay feels uncategorizable and free.
In your LitHub essay “on the Power of Horror,” you write that you “remember early moments of our 2020 lockdown feeling as if I were trapped in The Shining movie.” In your podcast interview with Kevin Young at the New Yorker, you said that horror stems from ambiguity and leaving it to the reader’s imagination.
Can you compare the process of writing The Shining with editing Essays? How did you organize the poems in The Shining in a way that elevates the feeling in Bernadette Mayer’s poem, “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica: “Nothing outside can cure you, but everything’s outside”?
DL: It’s interesting to think of the poet’s essay as having a form, because I feel it doesn’t necessarily take any one form. But it’s brilliant if you are noticing patterns in the pieces in Essays, like a series of questions engendering a new set of questions. You’re right–I feel the poet’s essay is uncategorizable and free, much like a poem is.
Thank you for listening and reading what I have said about horror. And for mentioning my favorite Mayer poem. There could be some similarities to the act of writing The Shining to editing Essays, but it wasn’t exactly the same process. Writing The Shining was a flowing feeling. The poems happened in an extremely fluid manner. I felt as if I were tapping into something I had been holding myself from for a while. There was an obsessive force to it all–perhaps fueled by my long obsession with The Shining.
Editing Essays was very enjoyable and there was an ease to this part of the process, after the work of organizing the symposium. I was so excited to work on the book and showcase the work of my favorite poets. I also was so happy to be engaged in the conversation of what an essay can do.
In terms of organization, I’d say that there was something different in the process of both books. In The Shining, the poems flowed from me initially the way that my mind walked through the rooms of The Overlook Hotel. Certain themes and scenes dominated the first structure of the book for me and then the actual form of it coalesced more around the voice of the poems. It was as if the holy ekphrastic act became the voice itself.
In editing Essays, I organized the book in the structure of the 2018 symposium, so as to give some continued integrity to that first structure. However, the themes that organized the original symposium were, in many ways, highly poetic. I’d say in organizing both books, the malleable organization of a poem’s logic dominated both processes.
TT: In your introduction you describe how the “term essay was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s, and it comes from the French word, essai, which means to test or experiment which what one knows as a learning tool (and is in some opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now, such as thesis).”
In speaking about “Four short and unfinished essays (with poems) from the ruins of Japanese American incarceration,” Brandon Shimoda says that an apology shares the same root as a story. Herodotus makes a point early on in his Histories about the impossibility of objectivism. How do dreams, mythology, and fantasy infiltrate the works featured in Essays and make the artifacts of history (the poet-essayist, the law, the Bible, the photograph) full?
To me, colors, shapes, and liquids specifically and archetypes generally-speaking play a similar role in The Shining, again drawing from and extending the eye/ I toward the central theme of horror. What are your thoughts?
DL: These are such beautiful patterns and themes that you are noticing. I love this idea of Brandon Shimoda’s you have mentioned here–that an apology shares the same root as a story. This idea relates to dreams in some important way that I can’t fully articulate. Dreams make artifacts that infiltrate history. Time is the progression of dreams. Maybe all pieces of dreams and time are remnants of something that once was (and is still). I think this is true in The Shining, both in the book and movie already written and produced, and in my poetry book. In a haunted space, there are dream-like associations between the objects infused with a somewhat fixed energy. In a poem this is maybe true, too. The central theme of horror for me is the dream of life. Horror asks us to wake up to realize that we still are dreaming.
TT: In “Burning Cane Fields,” Raquel Salas Rivera advocates for “poetry as something that not only I need, but that we need.” How might the participants’ work in the archives change not only the archives but also our way of thinking and understanding our history? How might it shape our future in some ways?
DL: I love Raquel Salas Rivera’s idea here of the interconnectedness of poetry. That to make a poem we must think of the needs of the we not just the I. I think a lot about the I of a poem always in concert with a we. Or more so, that the I and we of a poem are maybe the same thing. As a poet we summon many people in our poems. The voice of poetry is not just one voice. The archive is maybe a material way of understanding this and a way to see this idea manifest. It is a helpful learning tool and critical to the voice of poetry. But I feel most like: we need poetry. I still believe poetry has the power to save us all. Our future always has been and always will be: poetry.
TT: At the Powerhouse Arena conversation with writer Heidi Julavits you spoke of leaving punctuation marks out more and more in comparison with your earlier works. The Shining is your sixth full-length poetry collection. What effect does the lack of punctuation have, in tandem with a keen attunement to stanza length and other literary techniques?
DL: Ever since my first poetry book, AWE, I’ve been interested in omitting punctuation. My sparseness with it is a bit of a nod to my love of Latin. It also originated as I was finishing my first book and working as a Writer in the Schools in Massachusetts. One day, I was visiting a second grade classroom and got into a deep conversation with a student about the lack of punctuation in one of the Merwin poems I had brought into the class. For the student, who had just learned the rules of punctuation, Merwin’s act was an extreme act of rebellion. It was a critical moment for me in my understanding of what poetry really was capable of. I decided then to only use punctuation in my poems when I really meant it.
In terms of writing, is writing essays and poems quicker for you? How is writing The Shining different from writing Animal, for instance?
DL: It all depends on the poem or essay, and the situation. I always write poems faster than anything because I am most comfortable in the form of a poem. I go back and forth if this is a good thing or not, but the grooves in my brain seem tuned into the way I write poems so there is a quickness there. Animal was necessarily written over the course of several years, because the prompt of the book was to give a series of lectures as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. The lectures were supposed to be informed by the act of speaking the words, and the act of speaking took time. I felt Animal was done for a long time, but then a few years after giving the lectures, I went through and sifted through the language to make it work better on the page as a series of essays. The Shining was fueled by the blood jet, as Plath writes about. I had given up on poetry because everything felt so sad, but then the poems in The Shining were friends that said: “wake up, there is life still.”
TT: We talked a bit about The Shining’s connection to “Reimagining Ekphrasis,” a seminar you have taught at Columbia. We see the seams of your role as the poet (Dorothea Lasky) as being trapped the way Shelley Duvall (the actress) is literally trapped in the guise of method acting. much like in Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence. It’s no coincidence that you begin with “Self Portrait in a Hotel,” to open The Shining. Do you see yourself carrying on the tradition of ekphrastic poetry? In what ways is it a paean not only to the film but also to the female body in isolation, and terror?
DL: Thank you for being in that class! I so wish we were still together in the classroom space of one of our class sessions, even if just for a moment. Thank you for all of these ideas here. I was just thinking of method acting this week. I do feel that embodying a poetic persona is like becoming one with a character. What is and is not you isn’t clear to everyone, but there is a difference between the poem I and the real self, maybe. The idea of the self-portrait has always fascinated me in general and especially in regards to poetry. The choices an artist makes when showing the self are not random. Or if they are, they are a wonderful sense of random. The terror of being is the isolation of being a self that no one (including the self itself) will ever fully see. Does it even exist like we think it does? That’s the terror.
TT: Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world?
DL: I still feel poetry can save us all.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.