Prac Crit

Save Your Flowers

by Dorothea Lasky

Interview

by Rebecca Tamás

Dorothea Lasky was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and now lives in New York City, where she is an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University. She has published four collections of poetry, AWE (2007), Black Life (2010), Thunderbird (2012), and most recently Rome (2014). One of a wave of exciting and innovative contemporary American female poets (Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong and Melissa Broder being merely the tip of that iceberg) Lasky has attracted much praise and attention in her native home, and in the UK and elsewhere, for her colloquial, earthy, playful and viscerally strange poems.

Maggie Nelson says, ‘Dorothea Lasky is one of the very best poets we’ve got. Her poems radiate weirdness and raw power; you can feel your mind grow new folds as you read them. They lay waste to milquetoast notions of poetic longing or melancholy, and instead go in for the vibrating, bloody facts of sadness, anger, desire, bare life, all returned to us more intensely, strangely, and sometimes comedically, by her words.’ Lasky’s poems are not like any others, and it can take time to acclimatise oneself to the cadence of her alternately violent, metallic, yet gentle voice. But after taking that leap, you find the poems on a constant repeat in your head – their strange beauty slowly unfolding, an endless reveal.

I met Dorothea at her light-filled Columbia office on a sweltering September day, the campus buzzing with the mixed excitement and dread of hundreds of freshmen beginning term. As something of a Lasky super-fan (her work has gradually become the thing I turn to most when my own poetry is blocked), I was a little nervous to meet the writer herself, unsure whether the frank joyfulness of her writing would be reflected in who she was, the person behind the poetry. However, when Dorothea arrived she immediately gave off that reassuring yet occult quality that can only be described as charm – laughing uproariously, lips glowing with bright pink lipstick, making me feel more like a visiting girlfriend than a stranger. Before we started the interview proper, we chatted briefly about Dorothea’s young child, the subject at the heart of ‘Save Your Flowers’, and our shared interest in the esoteric and magical, with Dorothea promising that by the end of our conversation she would have divined my star sign. This she did (Virgo/Libra cusp, if you’re interested), further proving to me that she is a poet who can operate outside of the normal strictures of our everyday reality. Then Dorothea pinned on a glittering pair of plastic earrings, and, with that ritual complete, was ready to begin.

RT

I wanted to start by asking where you began with ‘Save Your Flowers’? Were there particular ideas or images you wanted to interrogate when you started writing?

DL

I had a baby about nine months ago, but I had her very early, three months before I was due. When she was born I felt bombarded by people wanting to come and visit me in the hospital and celebrate her birth. I wasn’t sure if she would live, and yet people were filling my room with all of these celebratory, joyful flowers. I just remember being really angry at people trying to respond to what was happening that way. Of course the reality of the flowers was mostly very sweet, and sometimes even comforting, but the poem started from an anger at people wanting things to be OK and normal and predictable and the way they think they should be. We want things that happen to other people to be normal and OK because then we feel safe, as though bad things couldn’t happen to us. And so a lot of my writing of the poem came from thinking about that desire for normalcy, a desire which I understand, but which often makes me really angry.

RT

Did that mixture of the celebratory and the fearful – the desire for normality and happiness rubbing up against a very real darkness and danger – have any impact on the way you crafted the rhyme scheme of the poem? I ask that because the poem is chock full of half rhymes, and yet many of them seem to be masquerading as full rhymes. For example: ‘Save your kind regards, and visits / With doughnuts and kisses.’ The sibilance of that line makes it hit momentarily with the force of full rhyme, but then the reader finds themselves thrown off-piste, surprised by the sonic unpredictability of the language. Did you want to make the reader feel unsafe in that way, to shake their expectations of what a poem about birth or a young child might be like?

DL

Yeah, I wanted the rhyming to have an eerie quality. I love children, I love children’s literature, children’s culture and I’m fascinated by the darkness of childhood. I’m interested in how we want childhood experiences to be purely innocent, yet we can almost resent it when they aren’t. I also love horror movies, which often play on that darkness. A horror movie will have an innocent childhood moment which starts placidly, only to be upset or undermined – a weird sound will come in, or a disturbing image. I wanted the half rhyme in the poem to have a similar impact, to give the sense of something being slightly wrong.

RT

In the poem there is, as you’ve described, a push back against people’s desire to normalise and make safe situations of intense pain and uncertainty. I’m also curious whether there is something about the closed-off intensity of the mother-baby relationship in the poem which is too much for the outsiders to handle. The speaker of the poem says ‘I am a fair maiden only to my tiny vixen,’ a line that manages to be deeply feminine, while also making its femininity inaccessible: a virginal ‘maiden’ who is actually a mother, and a powerful, potentially even seductive ‘vixen’ who is actually a ‘tiny’ baby. Was there something about the very public femininity that a woman is meant to display in her relationship with her child that you wanted to challenge?

DL

I should give credit for the ‘tiny vixen’ to my friend Heidi Julavits, a fiction writer, who wrote me an email when my daughter was born, describing her as a tiny vixen. That description gave me solace for some reason, perhaps because it seemed not to describe a totally out of control event, but a situation where the baby has some intent, where the universe has given her some power. So I really loved that. But in general I’ve learnt (and I could probably have predicted this, but couldn’t have totally understood until I experienced it) that with many life events that connect us to society – weddings, funerals, and especially some forms of motherhood – there’s an element of performance. You are expected to perform your devotion, perform your love, perform your caretaking and perform your protection. You have to show that your instincts are constantly about caring for your baby. That came out in the poem, how false all that performance is, because true love bonds are so private that they actually cannot be performed. Anything you put out to illustrate them is a conscious choice, it can’t represent the real experience, which is silent and is meant to be preserved in its mystery.

RT

That mystery really came through to me in the descriptions of the baby: ‘Ill repute, little babe of udders,’ and ‘Brave icelet unbecoming.’ These phrases seem to be rejecting innocence and the imagined purity of infancy, instead offering an agency through strangeness, through difference and change.

DL

Something I also couldn’t truly understand until I experienced it is that there is something magical about the fact that a person can’t be generalised. Often people want to make everybody’s experience have this shared trajectory of events, because we’re all going through the path of being human together. So: this will happen to you and your baby at 5 months, this will happen at 6 months, etc. That scientific approach can be very helpful, and yet it doesn’t capture the magical fact that each person has a very specific spark, that they are capable of doing something totally new. Even though I deeply respect history, I have always been very reverent of the new, believing that it can change everything, that it can create difference. I love that idea. It isn’t so important that it’s my baby, more that any baby, any new person is an individual and has the potential to do wonderful, unexpected things.

RT

You seem to be forging a more individual, differentiated version of motherhood too.

DL

Yeah, and in some ways that was a necessity. It’s hard to approach the things that happen to me in a way that society makes obligatory without feeling very fenced in. So it makes sense that I’d want to try and approach motherhood differently in my poems.

RT

In this poem you don’t flinch away from allowing the negative, fearful aspects of birth to be expressed, even if that might make people feel uncomfortable, and that openness is something which seems a feature of much of your work. You don’t hide emotional excess, confronting it in a tone and a language that can seem unusually simple, even innocent in its heartfelt description of intense experience. Did that way of writing come naturally to you, or did you make a political or aesthetic decision to address emotion in that form?

DL

It was a conscious choice. When I started writing poems, especially whilst studying for my MFA, I didn’t celebrate emotion in my work but tried to cover it up, couch it in fake language constructions. That was partly because I’d had certain experiences talking to fellow poets and teachers who said that emotion and emotional life within poetry is bad poetry, and there had been all sorts of ways that my education in poetry had sought to convey that. I remember talking to a professor in college, and he asked me who my favourite poet was. I said Sylvia Plath and he said, ‘I detest her pathos.’ I remember thinking, ‘So, if I want to appeal to this revered older male poet, I should take away any sort of emotional life, or make it not obvious…’

RT

Intellectualise it?

DL

Yeah, find a way to hide it, show my chops through how I could create language, because people come to poetry for the beauty of ornamental language and not for emotion. However, right after I finished my MFA I was doing a lot of teaching, a lot, and I had to teach people who weren’t necessarily empathetic audiences to how I spoke, to the ‘poetic’ or to me as a poet. So I had to think about how to convey information to people in a way that wouldn’t withhold access to what I was trying to say, or what I was trying to show. You may be preaching a really good word, but if no one understands then what’s the point? So I made a conscious choice at the language level that that’s the way I wanted to construct the poems. I’ve felt tiny hints of frustration since then because sometimes I’ve had criticism – some of which may be mired in misogyny, but some of which may be valid – that calls my way of writing childlike, or stupid, or without intent. That’s not a big suffering, but there have still been some annoying, fly-buzzing aspects to some of those comments. But I’m still really glad that I made that choice.

RT

I’m interested that you mentioned Plath there, because she often seems to come up in these discussions about how poets, especially female poets, talk about emotional experience. There’s a line in your book Thunderbird, in the poem ‘Death and Sylvia Plath’, where the speaker says, ‘Why do young women like Sylvia Plath, why doesn’t everyone?’

DL

That’s very related, and all the poets who have told me they don’t like Plath up until this point do happen to be men. I’m sure, though, that there are women who don’t like her poems. Maybe I just don’t meet them that often.

RT

I’m interested in how you feel about these negative responses to Plath, the idea that she’s too much, that her form of ‘confessional’ is self-obsessed, vapid and particularly female. Does the misogyny of that paradoxically give you confidence, in that it seems to be more about a fear of female excess than a genuine critique of her poetry?

DL

I do feel a vindication when particular types of people, the exact people you’d expect, say they don’t like her. Also I do think that overall people haven’t read her in the right way yet. It might take 100, 200 years for us to really get a perspective on her sheer talent as a poet, what’s happening in her poems, in a fair way. I’m actually teaching a course this semester called ‘Beyond Confession’, looking at Plath and Sexton and also Bernadette Mayer, Audre Lorde, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson and lots of others, through a radical feminist lens. I’ve always felt that making those connections was part of my life’s work. In fact I used to feel like it was my life’s work to save her – to save Plath! I know that probably sounds really stupid, but I wanted to protect her, to create some opening in which people could read her work seriously. Which is a really arrogant thing to say, that I could try to save someone who’s given me so much. But I felt a protectiveness, and that circle of protectiveness has now extended to other poets. But she’ll always be my main squeeze in that way.

RT

If you get a review that describes your own work as ‘confessional’, how do you feel? Is it a term that you’ve reclaimed then, and feel positive about, or do you still have some issues with it?

DL

I don’t feel as negative about it as some other things people could say about me. I understand that when you’re writing a review you often have to be quite pat, and think in terms which are very generalised. Especially now that most reviews are online, and you only have, like, five seconds to get somebody’s attention, you need terms they can relate to. But it does still feel like we’re putting something we don’t totally understand under the ‘confessional’ label, and to me it feels very old and tired and boring.

RT

Describing something as ‘confessional’ can also weirdly seem to personalise the emotion being described, to such an extent that it takes away any fear from the reader – the poem becomes a spectacle of biography in a way that actually manages to close it off from anyone else’s experience. There are some lines in your recent book, Rome: ‘sadness is a public feeling’ and ‘depression is a public feeling’. Do you want to reject the safe distance between the poet’s experiences and the reader’s experiences?

DL

I think that great strides have been made in the ways we think about emotions, the ways we think about sadness. There’s nothing really wrong with talk shows like Dr Phil that talk about feelings and give people a lifeline: ‘I was a drug addict but then Dr Phil told me to go to therapy and I feel better.’ That can be really positive. But I do think that it does reduce these experiences in a way that doesn’t take into account what’s dangerous, what’s universal within them. We talk about Sylva Plath and say, ‘Oh, she was this crazy person, she committed suicide while her children were in the next room, I would never do that, what a lunatic.’ What we don’t realise is that anyone could go down the path of doing really anything – any action that a human has done we’re all capable of. It’s not really that she’s crazy; we’re all crazy. We’re all capable of that, and facing that is really facing what it means to be human. So I do think there are problems when we talk about sadness, especially in internet culture, where we write a status update saying ‘I’m sad,’ wanting everyone to give all of this fake love, but no one is really there helping with the sadness. I can go into the Coliseum and say ‘I’m sad’ and all these people may cheer, but they’re not going to be there tomorrow to actually help with what that means.

RT

You do bring suffering and sadness into your poetry though, and make those emotions public in all of their extremity.

DL

Yes, but I want my poems to be a space where people can feel an actual deep care, where they can feel like they have a place to go that is beyond getting a status like. I want my poems to be like a really good friend that’s there for you every time you want them to be. If you create a poem which you are lucky enough to be able to get published somewhere that is accessible for readers, then when a person comes along and needs you as this friend, you’re there. And like any good friends, you’re not afraid of what could happen between you, whether that’s joy or sadness.

RT

Is there any connection between that and the fact that you quite often use your own name in your poetry? Are you putting out a hand and saying, ‘I’m actually here with you’?

DL

I don’t think of it exactly as myself, as I’m sitting here now, but as a persona, which may have elements from me but is a character. But I do like the gesture, from O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer, of using your own name, because it’s disarming. It’s a way of saying, ‘I am not this separate person in society, a POET. I have one name, just like you.’ It’s meant to make the reader feel more comfortable.

RT

You seem to take a lot of genuine care of your potential readers. Are you very aware of them as real, breathing people out there in the world?

DL

The reader is really, really a person to me. I mean, I could be writing to a robot, if they’re capable of reading, and if we get to a place in the future where that’s possible that would be wonderful, but I can’t really conceive of that. So for now the reader is actually a person – no matter what time they’re reading in they have some element like me, even if they have very different lives and seem very different. We can still share the emotions that poetry gives us access to.

RT

Is there something particular about poetry, do you think, that can make that connection particularly well between a writer and a reader?

DL

Hopefully everyone at school has some sort of language education, or at least they are speaking and learning how to write in some form, and so language is this almost universal way of communicating. Because we’re always talking, because we spend so much of our time constructing our emotions and thoughts through words, poetry can be a special place to make connections that everyone can experience. I really do think that everyone writes poetry or wants to write poetry. I did research years ago in a set of public schools – I was sitting in science classrooms and there were so many students there, writing poems in class. It was wonderful to see that I was not special, that so many people were using poetry to process what was happening to them. It’s a source we can really tap into.

RT

In Rome you have a poem called ‘Why Poetry Is Hard For Most People’, and in it you offer a few potential reasons: ‘because speaking to the dead is not something you want to do’, ‘because life is no more important than eating or fucking.’ How do you reconcile the fact that poetry has the huge communicative advantage of using a shared language, and yet it is still often be viewed as a niche and ‘difficult’ art form?

DL

I don’t know if I can. I’ve always deeply blamed our education system, because I do think there’s elitism at play that wants to make not only poetry, but all the arts very specialised past a certain point of development. Certainly in high school only the ‘smart’ children (‘smart’ of course being so mired in other things: socio-economic situation, race, and class) – only those kids are privy to learning how to ‘unpack’ a poem, how to really tackle poem and conquer it, because their intellect is made to seem so specialised. We don’t, especially in the US, want to look at poetry as something every student is capable of, because that would be dangerous to those who control the school systems. All students, regardless of their backgrounds, would realise that they are capable of speaking very well; that there are not certain individuals who control what constitutes good language. They would realise that language is not just this agreed upon set of constructed ideas, that it’s not an MLA citation or a five-paragraph essay, that everyone can create new and beautiful language. So it is very frustrating to me when people say, ‘I don’t like poetry,’ or, ‘I don’t understand it,’ because all of that seems the fault of a system that doesn’t want to give poetry its power, and that doesn’t want to give people their power either.

RT

If we empower young people to have the confidence to write, and share, their experiences and feelings through poetry, then that might be perceived as dangerous?

DL

Yeah, because then I think that the people who get to define what ‘good’ poetry is will be at a great disadvantage. Because the ways they define it are not really based on poetry at all.

RT

Is a dislike of those definitions part of the reason that you mostly write in free verse? Because often in school, certainly in the UK, students begin with poetry by trying to ‘crack the code’ of meaning through a poem’s formal structure…

DL

As if when you have the key to the form you can understand the poem, and it becomes totally vulnerable to your intellect!

RT

Right – whereas you might agree with the idea that if you enjoyed a poem then you’ve understood it? As long as it’s not a blank then something’s happened, a kind of creative understanding has been forged?

DL

Yes. It’s aesthetic logic, aesthetic understanding – you’ve taken in something and something has changed within you. That may not be obvious, it may not manifest itself for months or years, but it’s a form of understanding. Especially in educational systems, that kind of aesthetic understanding is very dangerous, because it can’t be quantified or formally understood. It’s very hard to explain how a poem changed you, how a painting changed you. You might not be able to say for years.

RT

Thinking about that, it would be fascinating to wheel back to ‘Save Your Flowers’ for a moment and talk about its layers of ‘aesthetic logic’. The poem seems to be powerfully under the aesthetic influence of the moon, which is mentioned at the beginning and end of the work, its strange light seeming to permeate and contain the text. The moon is of course variously seen as a symbol of the unconscious, of creativity, of occult reality and of the female. Were you attempting to work with any of the elements of that symbolism, and if so, why were those elements important to how you shaped the poem?

DL

Yes, I was. I had been up until this point been working, or more so thinking, of my next book as something called The Moon Book. I thought that it might function much like an occult text, something like The Rainbow Book (edited by F. Lanier Graham and published by Shambhala in 1975), which is a collection of texts devoted to thinking of the possibilities of the colour spectrum. So, when I wrote this poem, I was thinking that: ok, I am writing a book with poems all about the moon in certain ways. And of course, I was also thinking of that rule people often promote in poetry workshops –don’t use the moon in a poem, it’s been done! I’ve always wanted to play with words or ideas that people have felt were overused or couldn’t be done well anymore. I’m not sure if this poem is a success in that regard, but all of these notions are the light of the moon that fell over my working of the poem.

RT

The poem is also dominated by the aesthetics of reversal. The baby, ‘a goddess uncuckcooned,’ is ‘sunbathing on the moon’. The poem’s speaker is ‘Praying only backwards’, and the flowers of the title are ‘dug deep from hell’ rather than growing up into the sunlight. Traditionally reversal, and backwards or inverted imagery, has indicated the realm of the occult or the spiritually nonconformist (I’m thinking of the upside-down cross of esoteric practice, the hanged man of tarot, the wise fool, or the worshipping of female deities in paganism over the male god figures of monotheistic religions). I wondered whether the reversals I mentioned had anything to do with creating an alternative, even magical or occult reality within the poem?

DL

Yes! My favourite movie ever is The Shining, and that movie – obviously being an occult text too, in its own way – deals with the backwards elegantly and beautifully. When Jack Torrance visits the ghost of a murdered woman in Room 237, after she starts running after him, he backs away and even steps backwards out into the hallway as he’s leaving the room. When Jack comes at his wife abusively down the set of stairs in the grand room of the hotel, she walks backwards down the stars, trying to swing at him and defend herself. When his son is trying to get away from him near the end of the movie – as Jack has tried to kill him and his mother – in the snowy maze he walks backwards, tracing his steps backwards through the snow. And then of course there are all of those moments in Twin Peaks, where the characters speak backwards and make a kind of magic of regular speech. I think I was thinking of these sorts of images and scenes when I wrote the poem, because the poem is so much about the trauma of birth, and when I gave birth it had a particular air of trauma, and produced in me the act of replaying certain scenes over and over again, almost as if one could go back in time and make them play out in another way. The backwards is always about the power of where memory and the imagination coincide – how when you exist in a place of no atmosphere, you see what could have been and what is all at once.

RT

I’m curious whether there are any connections between all of these occult potentialities, and the themes of feminine experience that you are also exploring?

DL

Yes, I think so and I hope so. I’ve always been tied in lots of ways to the idea of witchcraft and how it is and is not misogynist to call a female poet a witch (or any female for that matter). I worship Alice Notley, and she’s a poet who seems to have endless insight into the intersection of the occult, poetry, and what it’s like to be a female in the world. I’ve been obsessed lately with the idea of the infinite circle and the goddess, and I believe the poem explores these ideas, as will the book it’ll be in.

RT

Thinking back to the ‘reversals’ and ‘backward’ elements we were discussing, I wanted to ask about the poem’s colour scheme, in which blue seems to have positive connotations of transcendence, abundance and harmony (‘with the eternal blue light she glows’ and ‘milking and milking, blue note on blue’) whereas yellow, the colour of joy, appears only once, to describe the unappealing ‘sun yellow weeds’. Were you seeking to change the reader’s associative visual understanding there? Reverse the poetic experience on an imagistic level?

DL

Yes. A big reason is that one of my favourite books has always been Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, in which she explores how blue is a kind of passionate colour, one that is not of the calm and tranquil forgiving ocean, but one that is of the hottest kind of feeling, and I think this kind of aim is forever interesting. Not only did her book change my ideas of blue and the potential of blue as a colour, but it made me consider how all colours can be beyond the ways we think of them. So I think I was exploring this idea of inverted associations of colour in this poem. I was also thinking of the bili light, which is a light therapy tool often given to newborn babies with jaundice. It has such an unearthly glow. What does it mean for a new life to bathe within this light? That question is what my poem is about.

RT

I can’t help seeing a connection there to the way Wallace Stevens uses colour in his work: both of you seem to have the rare quality of wanting to enact colour as almost another sense, one that can be powerfully used to shape the reader’s aesthetic and emotional experience. Colour just seems to be much more central to your practice than it is for most poets…

DL

Colour, for me, is the reason to read and write poetry. If I had any sort of talent in visual art, I would love to be a visual artist, because it is the visual field that holds excitement for me, more than words do. Thank you so much for mentioning Stevens, as his work is so key to the ways in which I consider using colour in my poems. His poems are paintings and that’s what I want my poems to be as well.

RT

How do you go about forging the visual worlds in your poems? Is it something that comes naturally after subject matter, or does imagery often appear to you before content?

DL

I think that language happens at the very first – like, a line will seem ‘poem-like’ and I will think to record it, and then I will have a set of images that feel necessary to the poem, and I will attempt to describe them. Subject matter is often of no interest to me, but just sort of happens. I wish I could be more keyed into it, as I know that is mostly what makes writing important to an audience beyond the traditional poetry readership. But for me, when I write a book of poems I am making an album or a visual piece, and the subject itself seems ten steps beyond everything else.

Save Your Flowers

by Dorothea Lasky

Save your congratulations and your flowers
My baby is sunbathing on the moon
And with the eternal blue light she glows
In her clear house, with shutters
Save your kind regards, and visits
With doughnuts and kisses
Save your little nothings that amount to nothing
Save it save it
Purple green and christened blue
The flowers dug deep from hell
That you ring round my room
Another woman would have liked them anyway
Save your flowers and your missives
My skin is old and supple
But I am fair maiden only to my tiny vixen
Milking and milking, blue note on blue
Save your sadness and your leads of love
Your love won’t hold me
Like a goddess uncuckcooned
Ill repute, little babe of udders
Stirring the inevitable
Dancing dancing
But not by myself anymore
Wrapping and wrapping the skin on the moon
So save your chrysanthemums and lilacs
Roses and tulips
Save your winter buds, and sun yellow weeds
I won’t need them where I’m going
Brave icelet unbecoming
Praying only backwards
Praying praying on the moon

First Published by Prac Crit.

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