Friday
Apr302010
Interview: C. Dale Young
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 10:00AM
Dilruba Ahmed, whose poems appeared in the March issue of The Collagist, interviewed C. Dale Young.
Four of C. Dale Young's poems appear the April issue of The Collagist. He is the author of three collections of poetry: The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books 2007), and Torn (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2011). He lives in San Francisco where he practices medicine full-time.
While Bruegel’s painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, underscores our ignorance of others’ suffering, your four poems—through a modern retelling of Icarus’ story—complicate our feelings of sympathy for the apparent victim. Can you tell us about the inspiration for this sequence of poems? What is its relationship to the manuscript you are currently working on?
I had not thought about Icarus while writing these poems, but I can see how that myth makes itself present in them, especially with the image of the wings. But I definitely desire a speaker in these poems who is complicated, someone who is a victim of circumstance but who is not one to be pitied or loved or admired.
I wrote the first draft of “The Halo” on July 10, 2008 while teaching at the summer residency of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. It has been a tradition there that the faculty read some very new work when they give their readings. I had no new work at the time, and I wrote this poem in longhand on the backs of handouts from the various classes and lectures. I did roughly 6 drafts in a few hours and read the poem that night. This, I should point out, is very atypical for me; I usually require a lot more time, years sometimes, to do that many drafts. But I was restless and felt attacked because of something a disgruntled writer had said about me. This disgruntled writer intimated I do too many things in my life and therefore cannot do any of them well. The need to justify myself, my existence, prompted me to return to a very defining moment in my own life, one I had vowed never to write about. And so, “The Halo” was born. Since then, I have written 9 more poems, all related to each other and this incident. I cannot seem to turn away from the subject matter now, and the speaker has become a real person to me, part me, part imagination. I have no idea how many of these poems I am to write. Part of me wants them to end now, and part of me is curious how many of them are to exist. A good friend is convinced I am writing one long poem in sequence, but I have no way of knowing if this is true or not.
Do mythology and/or art often enter your writing and, if so, to what effect? In your experiences, what possibilities have been afforded by such intersections? What have been some of the challenges or limitations?
I believe all kinds of mythology enter poems. If by mythology you mean specifically Classical Mythology, I am not sure. But I am one of those poets who believe the act of creation involved in poetry is based in myth. It is why I don’t believe most confessional poems are in fact autobiographical. In developing a speaker in a poem, it is always myth, always a voice larger than our own individual voices, a voice that dares say things we may never say in our own daily lives.
Whether Classical, Native American, Chinese or the Vedic, these “stories” are glimpses of our primal and necessary selves. They teach us something about our human reality, even if the teaching is not direct. Maybe teaching isn’t even the right word. Maybe what is learned isn’t even quantifiable on first notice. I never aim to use or appropriate myth, so there is no real challenge there. But I am always conscious of the speaker in my poems and the mythology of that speaker.
These poems are rich with ambiguity, particularly with respect to the narrator’s metamorphosis after the “accident.” Upon reading “The Halo,” we may regard the speaker as a sympathetic figure. But as we encounter the poems in this particular order, what we read alters our perception as he becomes “the very man [he] did not want to be” (“Mind Over Matter”), describing himself in “Cuboidals” as “a monster,/sick monster whose wings are spewing/from his back” who must be “restrained like an animal,” and ultimately likening himself to “the hanged man, the monster, / the witch and the unloved (“The Hanged Man”). The accumulation of these details creates new, darker resonances as we return to lines such as “I am still ravenous” in the first poem. These poems are in conversation with one another, whether we read them in this particular order or not. Could you talk about how these pieces collectively complement and complicate our experience of each individual poem?
All ten of the poems in this “sequence” I have written over the past two years have the same speaker, and he is complicated. He is a man who should have died in a terrible accident or, at best, have lived out his life paralyzed from the neck down. But he lives, and he walks and functions. But is that fact a blessing? That is what the speaker of these poems cannot answer for himself. The poems attempt to document not just the situation after the accident from different vantage points but also to examine the inner landscape of this speaker without simply being internal monologue or merely description of emotion. In this, the poems have been difficult to execute. The ideas behind them seem so easy in comparison to the execution, the getting it right. But yes, the poems speak to each other and inform each other. My hope is each poem will be able to stand on its own but that collectively they will give a view of something larger. I worry that many of these don’t stand on their own as strongly as I would like. I say this because I notice that when I send them out, they seem to be taken for journals in batches of 2-4. This makes me worry that they need each other more than I would like.
All four poems make use of lexical repetition. A few examples within poems: body, changed, I, and ravenous in “The Halo”; themselves, bloom, magic, dark, light, and me in “Mind Over Matter”; bed, dream, sheets, skin, wings, blades, shoulders, sheet, and bird in “Cuboidals”’; and axis, hanged, tilts, and avoidance in “The Hanged Man.” Some of the repetition takes place across poems as well. Could you talk a little bit about this repetition?
Between the poems of my first collection and the poems I have been writing lately, I notice I rely less and less on metrically-informed lines and more and more on the sentence. But syntax alone does not make a poem. The tension between line and syntax is what has always made a poem a flexible and sometimes violent machine. What I have noticed reading poetry from all across the spectrum is a hierarchy of elements in poetry in order to convey sense through sound. Fixed meter predominated for centuries because it occupies the rational mind with sound and allows the irrational mind to rise up, with regard to the actual act of composition. So, in many cases, what makes intrinsic or emotional sense in many poems arises from the part of the brain that cares little about sense. As you throw out meter, syntax and line break become more important. As you throw out syntax and punctuation, lexical repetition become more important. It isn’t that I want to throw out rational syntax or line break as means of parsing a poem I am writing, but that I want to rely more on diction to make sense of the experience. As a result, I have relied more and more on repetition. I guess one argument for the idea these may all be part of a large poem is the fact the lexical repetition in these poems link across the “poems” and not just within each.
With some variation in line length, all four poems are composed in 5-line stanzas. How did you arrive at this structure? Does the rest of your manuscript follow this pattern?
I wish I had a truly good answer to this question. I have been asked a variation of this question before, especially with regard to my second book, The Second Person, in which virtually every poem is in tercets. What I will say is I believe in the stanza. And intuitively, I find that stanzas function differently when you factor in how much information each kind can hold. Tercets seem beautifully suited to arguments both with others and oneself. Why this is so, I have no idea. But these new poems need more time in the stanzas to relay information before shifting focus. I started “The Halo” with quatrains, but they always came up a little short. So, I tried in the first revision to use a five-line stanza, and it seemed to work better for me. This has held true for each successive poem I have written in this series of poems.
What other writing projects are you currently working on?
I have been writing, much to the horror of many of my poet friends, short stories. I have 7 of them so far. They are all linked by character and/or narrator, so that the narrator of one story may be a character in another one. I have loved writing them so far, even though revising them is a beast in terms of time and energy. I envision eventually having an entire book-length collection of them, though I have no real idea how one proceeds with these things in fiction. I just keep writing new stories and mostly revising the ones already written. I have published the first story of the bunch, and I am hoping to get another one ready to send out sometime in the near future. Some have joked I am writing a novel in stories, but I don’t know if that is true, and I am not even sure if that is really a genre of book. I have no formal training in fiction writing, though I joke often that I have been studying fiction writing at Warren Wilson, where I get to learn about fiction from wonderful fiction writers like Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Maud Casey, Christopher Castellani, Kevin McIlvoy, Antonya Nelson, Peter Turchi, Victor LaValle, and many others.
What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?
I have just finished reading Henri Cole’s selected poems, which humbled me and ravaged me with its intellect and its depiction of a flawed human being who both accepts and despises his flaws. Cole’s work has been work I have returned to over and over in the 20+ years I have been writing poems. When I am feeling down about poetry, I read his work and feel alive again. I feel as if the poems were written just for me, something that speaks volumes about Cole’s power as a writer. I have also just finished Derek Walcott’s new book, White Egrets. I sat alone for 30 minutes after finishing it just marveling at this man’s ability to use the English language. The book is breathtakingly gorgeous.
For many years I have been re-reading John Donne’s poetry. It feeds me. And of course, I return to Plath and Elizabeth Browning. And when I want to be jolted out of this mundane world, I read Brigit Pegeen Kelly or Carl Phillips. And when I want to be humbled, to be cast down into the dirt so I can cry and no one will notice, I read Yeats or George Herbert. I read. I read much more than I write or revise. Reading has always been something that comforts me, that challenges me, that makes me feel alive. I have loved reading since I was a child. My parents will tell you I read before I spoke.
[Interview by Dilruba Ahmed]
Four of C. Dale Young's poems appear the April issue of The Collagist. He is the author of three collections of poetry: The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books 2007), and Torn (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2011). He lives in San Francisco where he practices medicine full-time.
While Bruegel’s painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, underscores our ignorance of others’ suffering, your four poems—through a modern retelling of Icarus’ story—complicate our feelings of sympathy for the apparent victim. Can you tell us about the inspiration for this sequence of poems? What is its relationship to the manuscript you are currently working on?
I had not thought about Icarus while writing these poems, but I can see how that myth makes itself present in them, especially with the image of the wings. But I definitely desire a speaker in these poems who is complicated, someone who is a victim of circumstance but who is not one to be pitied or loved or admired.
I wrote the first draft of “The Halo” on July 10, 2008 while teaching at the summer residency of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. It has been a tradition there that the faculty read some very new work when they give their readings. I had no new work at the time, and I wrote this poem in longhand on the backs of handouts from the various classes and lectures. I did roughly 6 drafts in a few hours and read the poem that night. This, I should point out, is very atypical for me; I usually require a lot more time, years sometimes, to do that many drafts. But I was restless and felt attacked because of something a disgruntled writer had said about me. This disgruntled writer intimated I do too many things in my life and therefore cannot do any of them well. The need to justify myself, my existence, prompted me to return to a very defining moment in my own life, one I had vowed never to write about. And so, “The Halo” was born. Since then, I have written 9 more poems, all related to each other and this incident. I cannot seem to turn away from the subject matter now, and the speaker has become a real person to me, part me, part imagination. I have no idea how many of these poems I am to write. Part of me wants them to end now, and part of me is curious how many of them are to exist. A good friend is convinced I am writing one long poem in sequence, but I have no way of knowing if this is true or not.
Do mythology and/or art often enter your writing and, if so, to what effect? In your experiences, what possibilities have been afforded by such intersections? What have been some of the challenges or limitations?
I believe all kinds of mythology enter poems. If by mythology you mean specifically Classical Mythology, I am not sure. But I am one of those poets who believe the act of creation involved in poetry is based in myth. It is why I don’t believe most confessional poems are in fact autobiographical. In developing a speaker in a poem, it is always myth, always a voice larger than our own individual voices, a voice that dares say things we may never say in our own daily lives.
Whether Classical, Native American, Chinese or the Vedic, these “stories” are glimpses of our primal and necessary selves. They teach us something about our human reality, even if the teaching is not direct. Maybe teaching isn’t even the right word. Maybe what is learned isn’t even quantifiable on first notice. I never aim to use or appropriate myth, so there is no real challenge there. But I am always conscious of the speaker in my poems and the mythology of that speaker.
These poems are rich with ambiguity, particularly with respect to the narrator’s metamorphosis after the “accident.” Upon reading “The Halo,” we may regard the speaker as a sympathetic figure. But as we encounter the poems in this particular order, what we read alters our perception as he becomes “the very man [he] did not want to be” (“Mind Over Matter”), describing himself in “Cuboidals” as “a monster,/sick monster whose wings are spewing/from his back” who must be “restrained like an animal,” and ultimately likening himself to “the hanged man, the monster, / the witch and the unloved (“The Hanged Man”). The accumulation of these details creates new, darker resonances as we return to lines such as “I am still ravenous” in the first poem. These poems are in conversation with one another, whether we read them in this particular order or not. Could you talk about how these pieces collectively complement and complicate our experience of each individual poem?
All ten of the poems in this “sequence” I have written over the past two years have the same speaker, and he is complicated. He is a man who should have died in a terrible accident or, at best, have lived out his life paralyzed from the neck down. But he lives, and he walks and functions. But is that fact a blessing? That is what the speaker of these poems cannot answer for himself. The poems attempt to document not just the situation after the accident from different vantage points but also to examine the inner landscape of this speaker without simply being internal monologue or merely description of emotion. In this, the poems have been difficult to execute. The ideas behind them seem so easy in comparison to the execution, the getting it right. But yes, the poems speak to each other and inform each other. My hope is each poem will be able to stand on its own but that collectively they will give a view of something larger. I worry that many of these don’t stand on their own as strongly as I would like. I say this because I notice that when I send them out, they seem to be taken for journals in batches of 2-4. This makes me worry that they need each other more than I would like.
All four poems make use of lexical repetition. A few examples within poems: body, changed, I, and ravenous in “The Halo”; themselves, bloom, magic, dark, light, and me in “Mind Over Matter”; bed, dream, sheets, skin, wings, blades, shoulders, sheet, and bird in “Cuboidals”’; and axis, hanged, tilts, and avoidance in “The Hanged Man.” Some of the repetition takes place across poems as well. Could you talk a little bit about this repetition?
Between the poems of my first collection and the poems I have been writing lately, I notice I rely less and less on metrically-informed lines and more and more on the sentence. But syntax alone does not make a poem. The tension between line and syntax is what has always made a poem a flexible and sometimes violent machine. What I have noticed reading poetry from all across the spectrum is a hierarchy of elements in poetry in order to convey sense through sound. Fixed meter predominated for centuries because it occupies the rational mind with sound and allows the irrational mind to rise up, with regard to the actual act of composition. So, in many cases, what makes intrinsic or emotional sense in many poems arises from the part of the brain that cares little about sense. As you throw out meter, syntax and line break become more important. As you throw out syntax and punctuation, lexical repetition become more important. It isn’t that I want to throw out rational syntax or line break as means of parsing a poem I am writing, but that I want to rely more on diction to make sense of the experience. As a result, I have relied more and more on repetition. I guess one argument for the idea these may all be part of a large poem is the fact the lexical repetition in these poems link across the “poems” and not just within each.
With some variation in line length, all four poems are composed in 5-line stanzas. How did you arrive at this structure? Does the rest of your manuscript follow this pattern?
I wish I had a truly good answer to this question. I have been asked a variation of this question before, especially with regard to my second book, The Second Person, in which virtually every poem is in tercets. What I will say is I believe in the stanza. And intuitively, I find that stanzas function differently when you factor in how much information each kind can hold. Tercets seem beautifully suited to arguments both with others and oneself. Why this is so, I have no idea. But these new poems need more time in the stanzas to relay information before shifting focus. I started “The Halo” with quatrains, but they always came up a little short. So, I tried in the first revision to use a five-line stanza, and it seemed to work better for me. This has held true for each successive poem I have written in this series of poems.
What other writing projects are you currently working on?
I have been writing, much to the horror of many of my poet friends, short stories. I have 7 of them so far. They are all linked by character and/or narrator, so that the narrator of one story may be a character in another one. I have loved writing them so far, even though revising them is a beast in terms of time and energy. I envision eventually having an entire book-length collection of them, though I have no real idea how one proceeds with these things in fiction. I just keep writing new stories and mostly revising the ones already written. I have published the first story of the bunch, and I am hoping to get another one ready to send out sometime in the near future. Some have joked I am writing a novel in stories, but I don’t know if that is true, and I am not even sure if that is really a genre of book. I have no formal training in fiction writing, though I joke often that I have been studying fiction writing at Warren Wilson, where I get to learn about fiction from wonderful fiction writers like Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Maud Casey, Christopher Castellani, Kevin McIlvoy, Antonya Nelson, Peter Turchi, Victor LaValle, and many others.
What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?
I have just finished reading Henri Cole’s selected poems, which humbled me and ravaged me with its intellect and its depiction of a flawed human being who both accepts and despises his flaws. Cole’s work has been work I have returned to over and over in the 20+ years I have been writing poems. When I am feeling down about poetry, I read his work and feel alive again. I feel as if the poems were written just for me, something that speaks volumes about Cole’s power as a writer. I have also just finished Derek Walcott’s new book, White Egrets. I sat alone for 30 minutes after finishing it just marveling at this man’s ability to use the English language. The book is breathtakingly gorgeous.
For many years I have been re-reading John Donne’s poetry. It feeds me. And of course, I return to Plath and Elizabeth Browning. And when I want to be jolted out of this mundane world, I read Brigit Pegeen Kelly or Carl Phillips. And when I want to be humbled, to be cast down into the dirt so I can cry and no one will notice, I read Yeats or George Herbert. I read. I read much more than I write or revise. Reading has always been something that comforts me, that challenges me, that makes me feel alive. I have loved reading since I was a child. My parents will tell you I read before I spoke.
[Interview by Dilruba Ahmed]
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