Darker Truths: An Interview with Denise Duhamel

by Andrew Wittstadt

Last winter I was able to interview Denise Duhamel, who has three poems in our new print issue, to talk about all things poetry.  It was a real treat to be able to ask these questions and hear the responses as a long time admirer of her work. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.

Andrew Wittstadt: First, I would like to say thank you, again, for taking the time to do this. I began preparing for this interview by going back over your body of work and reading some of your previous interviews. I must say, I found it difficult to narrow the interview down as your career has produced so much great work about so many different things. I decided to focus, mostly, on my two personal favorites, Kinky (Orchises 1997) and Blowout (Pittsburgh 2013), and the 17 years between these two titles is something that kept intriguing me, particularly the growth and evolution of a poet. As well as poetry’s place in our culture and the world in time in American history that most of us consider to be, well, to be generous, not ideal.

Now, I feel that I need to come clean and say Kinky is a book I can point to and say that it was one of the most influential books in my poetic life.  Really, I am saying this just so our readers are aware, I am a very biased fan and admirer of your work. It has been a large influence on me and many other young writers I know.

 

Denise Duhamel:  That is so great to hear, Andrew!

 

AW: The first question I want to ask is very general.  You have had a long career of giving writers and fans of poetry many wonderful collections of poems to read, contemplate, and enjoy.  Looking back over your career, do you ever think about the influence you have had? And will continue to have? If so, is it surreal? Humbling?

 

DD:  It truly is humbling.  As you know, so much of poetry is written alone, in quiet, and then the poems are read by someone else, usually alone and also in quiet.  So there is a real intimacy that happens. I feel this closeness when I read poems by poets I love from afar, this gratitude that they are sharing with me (and everyone who picks up their books) their inner, most private thoughts and how they shape those thoughts.  I’m not even necessarily talking about their personal revelations in confessional or post-confessional writing, but something even deeper than that—their actual intellect meshed with emotion.  So when anyone tells me they have read my work, or they say something smart about my work, I do feel extremely thankful. It’s crazy too that you connected first with Kinky, which was published over twenty years ago.  And I started writing those poems in 1990, which makes some of those poems a quarter of a century old. 

 

AW: Additionally, you are often referred to as a feminist poet, do you see yourself as a feminist poet?  I ask specifically in relation to your latest book, Scald (Pittsburgh 2017), but I am also curious about how your body of work as a whole contributes to, or brings awareness to these large ideas surrounding feminism, such as equal rights, sexism, body image, harmful social gender rolls?

 

DD:  I do indeed think of myself as a feminist poet.  When I was in elementary school, second wave feminism was pretty mainstream and popular.  In sixth grade, I was in the first class that had co-ed recess. Imagine? Before that, boys played on one side of the schoolyard and girls on the other. I remember the boys and girls in my class were really idealistic about feminism and we all would sing the Helen Reddy song, “I am Woman.”  Boys weren’t threatened by it. They seemed really into it and sang with gusto. So I never had the other hang ups or negative associations with the word “feminism.”  I’ve always felt comfortable as a political, feminist poet.  Poetry is a place of exploration and exaggeration and artifice so it seems an ideal place to be an idealist.  I think it’s a great venue to personalize social issues which are talked about in the abstract.  As Adrienne Rich wrote, “The personal is political.”

 

AW: As I mentioned, I am a big fan of Kinky (Orchises 1997) and I think the use of the Barbie doll in those poems is just brilliant. Did you find that using a cultural icon such as Barbie was more liberating while crafting that collection? Or restrictive? Or both? Did using such an iconic figure present any difficulties?

 

DD: Thank you!  I had so much fun using Barbie as a vehicle to explore feminism, class, race, and so on.  When I was writing those poems I felt like a novelist because every day I woke up knowing what my project was, who my main character was, and so on.  Every new poem usually, for me, is like starting from scratch.  But when I was working on the Barbie poems I just found my groove.  Whatever I was thinking about—or was in the news at that time—could be expressed via Barbie.  It was really like playing—yes, like playing dolls, but also as Carl Jung writes “the creation of something new is not accomplished by intellect, but by the play instinct.” 

 

AW: As serious and powerful as your work can be, there always seems to be an element of humor laced throughout the poems. Is this something that is intentional? To make the reader laugh while also describing a, sometimes horrible, truth or reality or even a single moment?

 

DD:  Yes! If a reader laughs there is an undeniable connection being made between reader and writer.  Laughing is a coping mechanism and a way to get to darker truths.

 

AW: Is there any subject that would be considered taboo for poetry? Or perhaps difficult to write about?

 

DD:  I am with Mr. Rogers on this one.  Fred Rogers was famous for saying, “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.” I don’t think any topic is taboo.  Choosing to put the work out into the world is a whole other story—and sometimes I do get scared about that.  But there are honestly only a handful of poems that I have worked on diligently but don’t feel right putting out into the world.

 

AW: This leads me to your book Blowout (Pittsburgh 2013). It strikes me as much more confessional and personal than previous collections? Was it challenging to get so personal on the page? Did it feel vulnerable? Did it make the editing process more challenging?

 

DD:  Yes, yes, and yes.  That was the most frightening book for me to publish. I had been confessional in my poems before but these had a sting to them that I had never allowed myself to write—or maybe never even allowed myself to feel.  It was challenging knowing how much to put in and how much to hold back in terms of personal disclosure.  It was the first time that I used a lot of dialogue in poetry—and I think it was a way for me to talk myself through it or to examine failed romance.

 

AW: I absolutely love “Having a Diet Coke with You.” Did you set out intending to do an O’Hara styled love poem?  Or did the poem just come to occupy that space by accident?

 

DD:  Thank you again!  It was a joy writing that poem.  I am a big fan of O’Hara but have never thought of just using one of his poems as a template.  It was a very deliberate emulation, a love poem to the beloved but also to O’Hara as well.

 

AW: “Having a Diet Coke with You” is particularly aware that it’s a poem, as the speaker keeps referring to the fact that it is a love poem and even its own aspects of itself, such as after a comma is used, “you are a baby but rather to say you are my baby, baby” followed by “That comma is the first and only comma in this poem / and I hope you will forgive this punctuation mark that doesn’t quite fit” (85). What was the intention behind this poems references to itself?

 

DD:  I was hyper-aware of love poetry as a performance.  After all, I’d written love poems (probably all poets have) after which the poems still stand but the beloved has left or the love the poet once felt is no longer.  In many ways re-writing O’Hara (or maybe writing via O’Hara) was a way to work through that very unsettling feeling.

 

AW: I specifically wanted to ask this after the O’Hara related questions, but I know you are a big movie fan and film references find their way into a lot of your collections. I wanted to ask, what do you think poetry’s relationship to films should be? Or already is? Or could be?

 

DD:  I love O’Hara’s poem “Ave Maria” which begins:

 

                        Mothers of America

                                                                       let your kids go to the movies!

                        get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to   

                        it’s true that fresh air is good for the body

                                                                                                            but what about the soul   

                        that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images

 

I think poetry and film are more related that people think.  Poetry is a series of images as is a film.  There is in intimacy also in watching a movie—especially the old fashioned way, in a dark movie theater where (ideally) your phone can’t interrupt you and you are transported the same way poetry can transport.  While it’s true that there are a lot of people in a movie theater, each is rapt up in the drama on the screen the same way we are rapt reading a good poem.

           

AW: Have you seen any good movies lately? Any favorites you tend to go back to?

 

DD: This year (2018) has been a good year for movies!  I’ve seen three fabulous ones about writers—The Wife, Colette, and Can You Ever Forgive Me?  I also really liked Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star is Born.  One of my favorite movies of all time is Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild which came out in 1986.  It’s part love story, screwball comedy, and thriller. In it Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels start a very bizarre romance-turned-road trip.  One of my favorite lines is when Griffith yells at Daniel—“You’re divorced?  You told me you were married!”

 

AW: What is next for you? Do you have another collection of poems you are working on? Or other projects? Artistically or otherwise?

 

DD: I am just finishing up the edits for my next book, The Unrhymables, which is a collaborative memoir with Julie Marie Wade.  We are both feminists from different generations—she was born the year I graduated high school.  It’s been wildly enjoyable to write.

 

AW: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

 

DD:  My pleasure.  Thanks for these questions!

 

In 1961, Denise Duhamel was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. She received a BFA degree from Emerson College and a MFA degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including: Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013), Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), and her latest collection, Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017).

 

Andrew Wittstadt is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana where he serves as poetry editor for The McNeese Review. His work has appeared in The New Limestone Review, Foothill, and The Cider Press Review.