Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood , winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life , which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE , A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering , and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1 , The New Yorker , Ploughshares , The Believer , and Best American Essays 2019 . Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of African American Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?
Dawn Lundy Martin: The question of seclusion. Mother. The question of desire, of intimacy. Claudia Rankine’s notion of touching without being touched. The question of physical touch. Its absence. The way an absence of touch can create erosion. Erosion. Is loving supposed to be a prohibition? An opening? Devotion? Multiplicity? A generative horizon line? The voluminous shape of blackness = freedom. Form, fragment, regurgitation, recreation, the body’s parts, its down under. What does the surface of the body indicate? If I say “cunt,” what does it mean to claim the lovely surfaces of the body, their meaty throbbing bits? When does the poem become a poem?
LO: “Form sets the thought free,” says Anne Carson, and I believe her. How did form and thought co-evolve in the unfolding of this work?
DLM: When I think of “form,” I think of the poem’s shape, the workings of the line (and where it breaks if the poem has lines), its physical constraints and how rapturous language can be when coming into tension with that which seeks to organize language. I often say that I write “poetry” not “poems” per se. In Instructions for The Lovers I move between what I consider poems and what I consider some other utterance approaching or approximating poetry.
Form at the very beginning of Instructions is undone. Instead, the utterances rely on the space around them and caesura. This untitled opening gesture in the book was once, in a different context, a tight, small lineated poem. I wanted, however, to open this book with a kind of staccato speech interrupted by white space in order to, perhaps, indicate a falling through into depths. Undoing the original poem was a revelation to me. It changed what I believed to be compelling the poem into existence. For me, it became a slower, more desperate prayer.
As your question regards thinking, I do not believe I think when writing poetry in so much as thinking is intention and attention to a thing that might want to be said. I let language lead me as if by a leather collar and leash. I decide beforehand what shape I want the poem to take, but in revision, sometimes, the shape changes and by extension so does the language. It’s in this last phase of the poem when there might be something like thinking.
LO: What’s the relationship between the speaker’s “I” and you, yourself? How is the book’s “I” informed by your I and/or eye?
DLM: All of the first person speakers are transparently a kind of me, Dawn Lundy Martin, except when there are two “I”s and one is transparently a kind of other person, as in the D+D poems and “D+S On Lovers.” “We” is where the distrust in the stability of utterance, in the Austinian sense of performative speech, is rendered as a way to resist dominant discourse’s imprisoning yoke.
The fact of the speaking “I” in Instructions is newish for me in poetry—that it appears stable, solid in its footing as my work as a whole calls into question the notion of a singular self.
If the “I” is fictive then why am I bothering here, you might ask. The construction of “I” makes it no less real because like any identity construction it feels real to us. Even when the self fragments the “I” holds as a gathering place, creating a tension between the we and the “I.”
LO: Did you have in mind any identifiable recipients for the utterance of this work? Did your sense of how or to whom the work was speaking evolve?
DLM: In JL Austin’s notions of utterance, there’s intention and force and the effect on the listener or reader. Both intention and effect are unknown and unknowable to me. I like how Austin talks about utterance, especially performative utterance, that act.
But there’s another kind of utterance in Instructions that is not captured in Austin’s range — prophetic utterance, prophesy. Prophetic utterance is meant to be heard or experienced within inner knowing, inner discovery. It’s anti-cognitive. Intuitive reception. A reversal of Lacan’s Mirror Stage. I recognize myself within the utterance and a part of its meaning making to create a new world.
LO: What felt riskiest to you about this work?
DLM: I teach a class called Risk and the Art of Poetry at Bard College. In the class, I urge students out of their comfort zones of making and into terrains less familiar, ones the can sometimes hurt or disturb or challenge. I try to get them to the places where their heart races, somatics of discomfort, in order to shift their poetics and discover something they do not know they are capable of. I believe that my work already inhabits and performs spaces of discomfort, but this is comfortable to me. I’ve always written poetry as I would write a letter. These are places where I say things I would not ordinarily say out loud, where I grapple with my most inner being, trauma, dissociation, selfing, etc. I can experiment wildly if I like or I can practice more conventional poetics. It’s up to what wants to be said.
Risk, then, is relative. It brings to mind the question of what can be said and by whom. Whose speech is policed by the regime, and whose speech is free. Donald Trump can say anything he wants at any time. On the other hand, Sonya Massey calls 911 when she thinks an intruder is entering her home and is shot in the face by the police after casting a religious spell, a prayer, in fear, and then saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Some subjects are at risk by their very being—black, Palestinian, trans.
Although pedagogically and theoretically when inside of poetics, the notion of risk can be useful, risk in art, as Dana said to me recently, is a banal rendering of risk—even at its most extreme, I think, like in the case of the NEA Four whose grants were revoked in the 1990s after the art being deemed indecent.
I do not hold the poem, the poem holds me. In that process toward holding, I’m not really me, however. The writer is not me. So, the writer is not subject to the regulations of the nation state or the reader.
LO: How do the book’s aesthetics inform its ethics, or, how do its ethics inform its aesthetics?
DLM: Writing in breath. The necessity of breath. The impossibility of breath. Navigating what’s unbearable. Instructions might be a poetics of desire. It calls for a wildness, eros, and hunger amidst the devastation. When the revolution comes we will still make love, we will fuck, we will hold each other with tenderness. Joan Retallack’s poethics of the swerve recognizes that the “chaos of world history” calls for a move away from lodged cultural and political modes. The swerve for Retallack has the potential to dislodge. If there is poethics in my book, its one that recognizes that love and grief are inextricably intertwined and that play is a radical enterprise. I’m not saying the abject can experience the sublime; I’m saying resistance is a space of possibility.
LO: What’s your sense of the aural life of this work? What role did sound or music play in the generative process, in revision?
DLM: I have never been a poet interested in syllabics or prosody when writing. I’m a poet who is engaged by music. I write by ear. The sound of the line, language, crux, and fissure. Not patterns, though sometimes repetition, even across works. The lyric surrounds with sound in this book. I leaned into that.
LO: As a medium somewhere between time-based and static, poetry engages temporality in a fascinating range of ways. How does time operate inside this work and across the experience it creates?
DLM: We come toward each other in the swell, swollen and ripe. Circular like time, spiraling time. Unstuck, poetry, from the nasty choke of the linear. Here, everything collapses.
My mother can’t remember time. When I visited her at the nursing home recently, I asked her how she experiences time, fast or slow? She said both or neither. Her memory is fading. She doesn’t know who called when or when I visited last. “Time is a mirror,” I wrote in Instructions for The Lovers, meaning it reflects our reality, whatever that is.
In my poetry the temporal is unconfigured and unhinged, tropical and leisurely, a writing across pigment, trans-ing and unrecognizable by ordinary logics. I hope.
LO: How did the book’s structure unveil itself to you? What emerged to shape its architecture?
DLM: When does a book become a book? I’d been writing poems not thinking about the book as book and composing/compiling poems not thinking about the poem as poem. Instead, I was consumed by the long moment, the long day, how the days lay out before me during Covid-19 quarantine and after, and how loving was occurring action within temporality. While walking with friends, I said, “I should write a book called Instructions for The Lovers. Nicole said, “Perhaps you already have.” After that I wrote the title poem, “Instructions for The Lovers,” to anchor the reader in these questions of lovers and loving. But I didn’t want romantic love to be the only consideration of love. “The Photographs: Black Aliveness” imagine a black self-loving given the constitutive terrorization and violence against black people. I didn’t know any of this until I began to put the works together as a book.
LO: What kept you company during the writing of this work? Did any books, songs, art works, philosophical treatises, snacks, walks, or oddball devotions contribute to a book-specific creative realm?
DLM: Ariana Reines teaching Rilke’s Duino Elegies on Instagram. Toi Derricotte’s daring and experimental poems in a chapbook we were writing together titled, A Bruise is a Figure of Remembrance. My own breaking body, how I developed a confluence of debilitating symptoms for which no doctor could determine a reason. A resulting near madness. My mother’s pain for which no doctor took the time to diagnose. The orgasmic sphere of meeting—that intimacy. Christina Sharpe’s astounding Ordinary Notes. The practice of reading out loud, lovers, in bed. Terrance Hayes’s hopeful To Float in the Space Between. Reading new writing on FaceTime with Justin Phillip Read. Zun Lee’s collection of over 5000 lost Polaroid photographs of black people. Long walks in a cemetery near our old Pittsburgh house with Stephanie during Covid lockdown. There’s a tremendous hill that leads to the pond where the male toads tore the female toads to near pieces in mating. The institutional beat down. Resulting mounds of race work. Exhaustion. Sara Ahmed’s “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism.”
LO: How has it been to shift out of the creative space of this book? What are you working on now?
DLM: I have been simultaneously working on an essayistic memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing about the double sidedness of black exceptionalism. Instructions for The Lovers emerged interstitially between its sentences and paragraphs and logics. The tongue licking between the teeth biting.
Lisa Olstein is the author of five poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (2006), Lost Alphabet (2009), Little Stranger (2013), Late Empire (2017), and Dream Apartment (2023). She has also published two books of nonfiction: Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020), a book-length lyric essay on the intersection of pain, perception, and language; and Climate (Essay Press, 2022), an exchange of epistolary essays co-written with Julie Carr.
Olstein’s honors include a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, Hayden Carruth Award, Writers League of Texas Discovery Book Award, and Sustainable Arts Foundation award. She is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs. She is also the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite and curates an interview series with poets about their new books for Tupelo Quarterly.