Q&A with Dorothea Lasky after her lecture, “On the Materiality of the Imagination,” Seattle Arts & Lectures, Nov. 21, 2013
Rebecca Hoogs: I am curious about your process of writing these essays, of writing prose versus writing poetry, and how those two--if those two processes are similar? Dissimilar? And where you find your sparks for each?
Dorothea Lasky: Well, about a year ago I finished a dissertation in education and that was a horrible process [laughter], because I had to think completely differently than I did when writing a poem. Everything I said had to be defended by some piece of scholarship, and it kind of was a horrible but really important experience, because I started thinking of prose that way--like that someone was ready to beat it up. Of course, you don’t think about your poems that way, they can be flimsy and fragile at times. So I think for me, writing these lectures was a wonderful kind of synthesis of the two, that I could make tiny little vulnerable leaps, but I still thought about what would happen if people tried to beat up the sentence.
RH: Where did the prose, where did the essays start from you? Did they start from poems you have loved and lived with for years? Did they start from more anecdotal observations?
DL: I guess just obsessions. In the last few years, I was able to teach some courses around themes that I wanted to, and one of them last fall was called “Roman Poetry and the Metaphysical ‘I’” and I was trying to make a synthesis between Latin poetry which I loved as a classics major in school, with hip hop. So I taught this class kinda not knowing what I was doing and then I was able to create a lecture around it. The same thing happened with color--I had taught classes on color so I was able to kind of translate the whole semester into a lecture.
RH: Can you tell us more about that? That sounds fascinating.
DL: Well I’m really really obsessed with color. I grew up--my mom is a visual artist, so I just grew up with a lot of color and visual stimuli and it was always a great source of inspiration for me in writing poems. Color has been a lifelong devotion.
RH: I read that you if you weren't a poet, then you might have been a painter. Is that true?
DL: I would have loved to, if I’d had any talent. That and a ballerina but I never took dance classes seriously.
RH: Speaking of obsessions, what would you say are some of your other obsessions?
DL: Is it okay [laughing] for me to say this on stage--? I would love--this is my dream--to be able to read everyone in the universe--not to necessarily read, but to have access to all the private thoughts and correspondences of every person in the world. That would be my dream, to have access to, like, the email passwords of just everyone in here. [laughter]
RH: It seems like that dream is coming true...
DL: Kind of like the panopticon, except I’m the panopticon. Also, animals are just a deep obsession for me. I have written a lecture called “The Animal” which is part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. I’m obsessed with the fur, the warmth and the fur.
RH: You just want the fur?
DL: I do, I just want the living fur.
RH: Okay. Could you talk a little bit more about your process in writing poems? Do you have a practice? What is that process like for you?
DL: Yeah, for me--my poems are really stimulated by the visual world. I think that’s just about kind of being stuck when I was little, in museums a lot of times, and not really being particularly interested, and having to have something to do. So when I’m writing poems, I just get into creating experiences for myself where I will be able to look at things for long periods of time and translate that experience into poems.
RH: The Bagley Wright Lecture Series--it was interesting, when I was reading about the Lecture Series, it’s designed specifically for mid-career poets--it has that language--and I was wondering, do you think of yourself as a mid-career poet? And In writing these lectures, has it invited you to reflect on where you are as a poet, where you’ve been and where you’re going? Has the writing of these essays affected your poems, or generated ideas for future directions?
DL: Yeah, well it was such an honor, and especially because the language is put that way. I don’t know if I would have thought of myself in that way, but I’m happy to have taken on that new definition which I will carry with me. It’s been extremely generative writing these lectures and thinking about how to create, you know, a kind of poem-essay. It’s been helpful to think about--I don’t know if you guys watch that show where they translate outfits into rooms? Have you ever watched that? It’s on HDTV or something, you know--”this is my dress; can you make me my living room?” Nobody has ever seen that show? Has it been that long? I haven’t had a TV in 5 years! Okay, you know what I mean--well, we can imagine. I think what’s been great about these lectures is taking a particular poem that I’ve written, and thought about the structure of that, and translated it into a lecture. Like a dress into a room into a poem into a lecture. So for this lecture today, just thinking about how to see those things as simultaneous has been so helpful for my creative process.
RH: You mentioned your work in education. You edited, last year, a collection of essays and lesson ideas for how to teach poetry to young people. Why is that important to you?
DL: Well I can’t imagine a school where a person is not supported for being creative. I was so lucky and privileged to come from a home life and then (even though I did go to a public school from K-12) a wonderful school system that allowed me to express myself as much as possible, and that it really was a system that supported the arts. I’ve always been very, very afraid that there’s something about our educational system that could be turning in the other direction. And so that’s something that I hope is a lifelong fight, and that’s why I pursued some education in education--kinda meta--and decided to edit that book. So I hoped that that book would be the first of many books that I could edit through that sort of work.
RH: You said in an interview that your favorite writers might be called ‘emotive.’ What do you mean by emotive? Who might be some examples of that?
DL: I wonder when I said that? [laughs] Interesting question.
RH: or, who are some of your favorite writers--
DL: No, no--it’s a great question, I shouldn’t make a joke. I guess I feel that in order for any art or any poetry to last through time there has to be the shared imagination, but also an emotion that’s shared. So that when a poet experiences some sort of intense emotion, it doesn’t have to be specifically put in that poem, but that it should be a kind of gift that somebody is giving to the reader throughout time. So if you’ve gone through a horrible breakup and felt really awful for a long time, that you have kind of this shared--this core humanity that you can put within your poem, and even if you dress it up to be about your cat dying and not having enough Frosted Mini Wheats at the grocery store, the core of that emotion is there in the poem. And somebody two hundred years from now can take that with them. One of my favorite poets is Catullus and he’s a poet that I consider very emotive. He had a lot of youthful feelings about being in love since he died at thirty, but we can feel that passion still--that passion is timeless and that emotion we can carry with us as humanity forever. So I guess that’s the poetry I am most interested in--the poetry I would esteem to create.
RH: You mentioned being influenced by visual art, what are some of your non-poetry loves or influences? What visual arts, specifically, or music influences your work or your life?
DL: I love hip hop, and I’ve always loved Biggie, but I am--not a child, but a teenager of the nineties, so that makes sense. I always loved Gorky, Gorky was always my favorite painter when I was little. I grew up with a lot of Native American art so I actually really love Northwest Coast American art. So it’s great to be here in Seattle and see all the artwork here.
RH: What would we be surprised to know about you?
DL: Oh boy, how long do we have? Ummmmm, you might be surprised to know that I have an awful temper. I’m an Aries with a Scorpio moon, and I have an awful--it will go away very fast, but I can be extremely mean in the domestic space, that’s why I maintain--so everyone here is safe. [laughter]
RH: Unless you cross me in theatrical space you’re safe--
RH: I know we talked about your book of lessons for students, and you’re teaching tomorrow at both Hugo House and B.F. Day Elementary. I’m wondering if you could--we have many writers in the audience, and I’m wondering if you could tell us about a favorite writing prompt either for young people, or for your students, or for any writer here, and send us out into the night with an idea for writing.
DL: Yeah! So, an exercise that I love to do I call “The Red Exercise,” and it’s based on a poem by Gertrude Stein called, “A Red Hat.” Within that poem, Gertrude Stein says, “if red is in everything it is not necessary.” I’ve always been really obsessed with that line--why red? Why does it mean that it’s not necessary? So in this exercise, we always start with that poem and we talk about why red is necessary, and of course some of it--I don’t want to give too much away--is the fact that blood is red and that if we see blood everywhere that’s not necessarily a good thing. So that’s used as a highlight--in the exercise, we look for red objects and we spend a long time kinda looking at them, and then we imagine a kind of intense scene, and we look for a person interacting with red--so, someone drinking from a coke can, or somebody with red lips, or somebody, you know, driving a red car, running through a red light (hopefully not). And then we synthesize all of that into a poem, but the experience is that you start to see--you get into a red zone where you start to see red where you didn’t notice it before. It’s an exercise you could do with any color. You could get into a blue zone, a green zone, or really anything you decide--you can look for triangles, or you know, the word ‘duck’ or something like that. You can start to get in this state of noticing stimuli and synthesizing it into your work.
