Featured Art: “Veines” by Leo Arkus

Read “Hymenoptera” here!

Read “Irish Traveler’s Writers Block”

Interview conducted by Rachel Townsend

Rachel Townsend: Thank you so much for doing this, Joanne!

Joanne Dominique Dwyer: Thank you for asking!

RT: Let’s get started! So, you grew up in Queens, New York, and you now live in New Mexico—that’s a dynamic change of scenery. I was wondering if you find that coming across in any of your writing. I read your poem “Snow” in Belle Laide, and there’s so much cold imagery—the man with a shovel, the beavers clawing at the ice—associations that you make that are so powerful. Can you recall that shift happening in your work? Or perhaps your favorite things about both places?

JDD: I was born in Rockaway Beach Hospital, Queens, NY, and lived there from birth to three years old three houses away from the Atlantic Ocean. I left at three years old. I don’t have concrete memories of that time of course, but the ocean is a very primal influence. Even after we moved up to Rockland County, about 30 miles north of New York City, where my childhood home had a forest behind it, and a horse farm about a mile away, the ocean remained a constant throughout my childhood along with the forest.

When I was eight or nine years old, my mother signed me out for riding lessons through a town recreation program. After those lessons expired, I worked at the horse farm as a child in exchange for lessons.  I was exposed not just to caring for animals 20 times my weight—cleaning stalls, feeding, brushing and catching ponies in the back field—but to many types of human beings, including the staff of grooms who were predominately ex-cons. It was a rich early childhood. My parents descended from Irish immigrants, their parents were working-class people in New York City. But my mother was adventurous and she decided she and my father would learn how to ski and before long they became volunteer ski patrollers—so my brothers and I skied as children. So I do think that snow, water, birds, horses, mountains, and trees appear in my work. I don’t think there was a shift, really, because I didn’t really start writing until I was in New Mexico.

RT: What age did you start writing?

JDD: I did, you know, dabble a little like anybody would. But I really didn’t start writing till my early, mid-30s.

RT: That’s amazing. You’ve talked a little bit about doing ceramics now, too, and I was wondering if that very physical ritual interacted in any way with the mental challenge of creating a poem?

JDD: That’s a really great question. The  physical process or ritual of making ceramics is very different from making poems. It’s been a wonderful experience to have the tactile experiences of hands manipulating clay. Clay that comes from the earth—clay as material.  Whereas words are the material with which one creates poetic narrative, image and emotive energies. After years of  being cerebral—transferring thought and intuitive impulse and image into poetry—I’ve welcomed the physicality involved in ceramics. What they do share is a deep requirement of meditative focus, the losing of oneself over to the making, with the end result being kind of a calm thrill.  Pottery is 2000 years older than the oldest known poem.

One thing I love about pottery—besides touching something that comes from the earth—is the involvement of fire. You bisque fire, and low fire, then you color it with glazes and you refire it. You don’t need technology. I mean, yes, we have gas kilns and electric kilns, but you can also get a garbage can and fill it with all kinds of combustible materials and fire your pot. But mostly, it’s the fact that I get the privilege of doing something that was done thousands of years ago. The idea of when you’re on the wheel or doing hand-building pottery, or writing a poem, the level of concentration is a balm for the brain and one’s whole being. For many of us, we have 100 things running at once in our head and a hundred places to go. My poem “Irish Traveler’s Writer’s Block” speaks to this—there’s an endless myriad of things to do in the outer material world besides sit down and write. Writing and ceramic-making, as are other art forms, are privileges. Art may be necessary to a soul’s survival—but yet I say privilege because so many people have to exhaust and deplete themselves in order to survive on the physical plane, make a living, take care of others—survive injustice and war. I don’t take my privilege to create poems and pottery lightly. 

RT: I love that phrase you used, “calm thrill.” That’s so, so accurate—and since you mentioned “Irish Travelers Writer’s Block,” and in the same vein of what we’re talking about, there’s a lot of ritual and physicality in this poem. But, it’s very spiritual in nature, or religious. But then, the end is . . . chaotic, tangible, human. My favorite line was “a woman just shy of wallpapering her tongue.” I was wondering if you had any reflections on that poem, or that line specifically.

JDD: “A woman just shy of wallpapering her tongue” a few other poets recommended cutting. I’m so glad I kept it. Not every line or image in a poem needs to make rational sense. Mystery, without being totally obfuscated, and resonance on less rational, unconscious, primitive, emotional, and psychic levels matter to me. The phrase a woman just shy of wallpapering her tongue was a way to describe the speaker of the poem’s state of being—teetering on the edge of composure, the state of energy rising to bursting, to detonating or imploding. Wallpapering the tongue of a poet could mean so many things, and that too makes poems powerful—the reader can interpret as they like, as they project, relate, imagine.

It occurs to me now that I was not fully aware of why that line came to me and why I wanted it to stay. My guess is because my gut felt the poem needed a wild line at that moment and also to reveal the speaker of the poem was close to a mental, emotional rupture. Only now do I realize wallpaper is decorative and an adhesive—so, to wallpaper a poet’s tongue could be to write with flourish, in flowery lyrics or purple prose. It could also mean to silence oneself—to hide the real tongue. To sequester the real words in one’s soul underneath a decorative gag. I’m so glad that I kept it.

RT:  Me too.

JDD: Some of what excites me in any given poem is the non-rational. What comes from the unconscious or from the imagination, and takes risks. Back to what you first said about the poem, having ritual, having some spirituality but also kind of devolving into chaos. Order and chaos, side-by-side companions—like the partnership of the sacred and the profane. At the end, we have the image of a somewhat spun-out, ravished woman in a polyester superhero costume with smeared mascara—possibly from crying at God’s funeral, or having been punched, or post-surgical facelift—why can’t those images have as much spiritual beauty as the chanting of the mantras or walking in a pristine mountain meadow?

RT: I love that.

JDD: Why, right? To me, it’s . . . it’s our life. It’s our humanity. Isn’t it a beautiful thing that this woman looks like she does, and she’s going to get a tattoo while she’s still got tequila in her. For me, that’s as beautiful as if I was describing a beautiful bird on a regal tree against a marvelous sky.

RT: Yes, and I think it kind of evolves too. It feels even more spiritual than this very habitual practice of what came before. Not to compare them, maybe, but it feels so much more vulnerable and raw. What a perfect way to end the poem, too.

JDD: Thank you.

RT:  I’m also really glad you brought up the value of the imagination and the subconscious. I’ve described your work as surreal dream-logic before—I think the associations that you make are so powerful and so poignant. It reminds me of another New Ohio Review poem that we published, “Inherit.” Which, if I may, I’m going to read a little bit of—

“When I get to heaven, I find the inhabitants shoeless,
braless, stock portfolio-less. Everyone has yellowed teeth.

Barbers save the hair they sweep up from the floors,
feed it to hogs, make winter hats with it.”

I mean, you can’t necessarily apply waking logic to that, but it’s so powerful in its image. So, my question was, do any dreams inspire your writing? Or, do certain lines come to you piece-by-piece and you knit them together, or is it more of a process where you sit down to write out a whole poem?

JDD: I think, on rare occasions, I have written down a dream and it might get in a poem or inspire a poem, or become an image in a poem, but in general, I don’t seem to have a problem getting in that dream state frame of mind while writing. I often write the first skeleton draft of a poem in one sitting. I do keep notebooks where I’ve done research or I’ve written down lines. I also keep rough drafts of poems that didn’t make it into a fully realized poem. Then I may weave. I start with a line. I rarely ever think I’m going to write a poem about such-and-such. It’s more like an image, an idea, or a single line that I begin with and then it snowballs and associates. I don’t really have a choice; that’s the natural way I write. At times, I do want to go into more narrative and sequential sequences and it’s a little more painful to do that. I find deep pleasure in many narrative poems and several of my favorite poets don’t write like I do. But my bent seems to be creating art from a more primitive, sensory place—surreal and associative, but with enough concrete grounding and ordinary contemporary references to balance. You touched on the idea of the world of imagination or the place where the soul resides. But where doesn’t the soul reside?

RT: Yes, I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. I’ve been studying some Whitman, and that’s all he does, duality. Good and evil, death and life. But I think that’s what makes great poetry, when you can see from different perspectives and not just through your own eyes.

JDD: Once in a while, and I’m not talking about the poetry world, I come across a person and they’re like, nope and no, and this is what I think. I’m always wowed, because I’ll say, we could do this or maybe we could do that, or I could see how you would think this. It must be somewhat freeing just to be decisive with your feelings and actions, especially if you’re not rigid or judgmental. Sometimes my seeing so many sides of something can be cumbersome. 

RT: I think sometimes it’s also a confine that many women are put in. To be forced to see all sides—we don’t always have the privilege to not be understanding.

JDD: There’s the concept of privilege again. Compassion as privilege! Yes. Maybe seeing more sides is an advancement in consciousness? In any case, you can’t go too wayward by moving through a lens of compassion. I suppose in lieu of decisive rigidity, I’ll stick with the vision of endless possibilities. 

RT: It’s hugely important, and a great segue to another question for you—how do you want to be remembered? Is there a particular word that you feel like encapsulates how you want your work, or yourself, to be remembered? That could be “compassionate”!

JDD: I’d have to think on this—or the opposite, give you a stream of consciousness or lying on a couch associative spill. Not easy, What one word to describe myself after I have left my body would I pick to be remembered? Curious, free, resilient—a trinity. Ha. It occurs to me that I put almost NO effort into promoting my poetry while alive. To a fault perhaps—I am likely on the top-ten all-time worst poet promoters—sometimes I feel like my books are children. I spent a lot of love and time curating them in the womb, only to neglect them once born (published).

RT: You know, you have work out there that is already so inspiring, and it’s been inspiring to me even before we were able to meet and have conversations. I don’t think that having your work out on social media is the end-all be-all. It’s like that email that I sent to you about Tony [Hoagland]. I guess you never know the impact that your work has. So there’s definitely strangers out there that are reading and thinking about “Inherit” or “Snow.” And speaking of Tony Hoagland . . . I wanted to ask you a little bit about your literary partnership-slash-friendship—What was he like? Was there any advice he would give you?

JDD: Let’s see—I went to Warren Wilson for an MFA, but I arrived there with not much of a poetic background education. I went to what was called the College of Santa Fe in my very early 40s, because I had only ever been to one year of college when younger. I wanted to get a bachelor’s degree and prior to visiting the college I had been to a workshop at Dana Levin’s house. At the time she was teaching at the College of Santa Fe and saw me in the hallway and she lovingly commanded me to declare my major as Creative Writing. I listened to her. I was like, what? She’s like, are you kidding me? I fast tracked a BFA and then Dana said, you have to go to Warren Wilson. I listened to her again. I didn’t know who Dean Young was, at the time, but Dean Young became my first faculty advisor and Tony Hogland was my second. After I received my MFA, a few years later, Tony and his wife moved to Santa Fe, and that’s how we became friends. So, for a period of about three or four years I was in a local workshop with him—he was an amazing giver of feedback. His poems can be deceptive, one can be fooled by them for their humanity, humor, and accessibility, but his intelligence and savant talent to articulate feedback was outstanding. If you read his essays, you can see what his feedback was like and what mastery he has with language. That in itself was art—his verbal assessment of a poem’s strength and its weakness. He was amazing. He really supported my tumble, associativeness, rawness, risk, and imagery. But he, along with Dean Young, said you have no lack of raw, imaginative material, but now you need to shape it into a poem. You need rhythm, or pattern; they taught me about trimming and limiting. I can do that now—I can see where I went from A to B to C, but to not go to D or E, you know, moving in and out of three tangents, not five or six. I recently opened a box containing some poems and notes and a letter Tony wrote me when fairly close to dying. Referencing the last reading he gave here in Santa Fe with the Welsh storyteller Martin Shaw in which any half-sentient person could tell Tony was in excruciating pain, but his performance, his embodiment of the poems he read was flawless. And dying of cancer, he still had the kindness in him to write to me after the reading. “I can’t tell you how great it was to see your beautiful crying face in the audience.” I hope I wrote something back in kind that said “No, thank you, for writing poems that move me to tears.” Tony was the most humble poet and the most non-competitive and generous poet to lesser-known and unknown poets alike. He gave and gave—his love of the art of poetry was much larger than his personal ego agenda. 

RT: Wow. How amazing. Everytime I read one of his poems I think that—he’s clever. But he’s also so very honest.

JDD: So honest. He never postures.

RT: I have one last question, if that’s all right. The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project—would you mind sharing a little bit about your role in that? Or, if you had a particular experience that stuck with you?

JDD: I appreciate you asking that, because sometimes I think my time visiting memory care facilities has more meaning to me than any other experience of poetry. Including any successes I’ve had in the poetry world. I spent about eight years visiting folks in various stages of memory loss. I noticed a lot of the programming in the facilities was, you know, someone would come play the piano and sing show tunes, or bring some dogs in, do kindergarten-level art projects, play bingo. I think I have a poem somewhere, maybe in Rasa where they’re playing bingo and Judge Judy’s on the big television. So to arrive with poems in hand to read and recite —not my own poems, I brought other poets’ poems,  because the residents were losing language along with memory, a few folks completely unable to speak, turned out to be a jewel in the hand. Some of the poems turned out to be poems they had to memorize in school. And where language was fading and slipping, somewhere in their brains were stored these old poems and it brought the residents so much joy and pride that the lines of the poems came back to them and they flowed from them. I would do call-and-response of familiar and unfamiliar poems and could see their eyes light up tasting words and rhymes on their tongues again.

One of many favorite poems I recited in a call and response manner with the residents is actually a prayer—the Navajo healing chant, “I Walk in Beauty.” One Valentine’s Day, I brought Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and in the haphazard way of picking a card from a deck of cards, I asked each person to put their finger on the small volume as I flicked the pages in order to pick a Neruda love poem meant magically for their ears. Here in New Mexico, a third of the residents were native Spanish speakers. I gave each person the choice to have me read the poem in Spanish or English, or both. One woman—she was so tiny and she was so weak, so beautiful. I had not previously experienced her as verbal. When her turn came, I read the poem in Spanish. She burst into tears and trembling, she attempted to stand up from her wheelchair to grasp hold of me. As I read Neruda she was mouthing the words, in similitude to tears flowing down her cheeks. 

RT: Oh, that brings tears to my eyes. That’s so lovely.

JDD: Another one that stands out—there was this wonderful Italian man in his late eighties from Brooklyn named Tony. What I would do is read poems, do call and response, and there’d be themes; for example, a Joy Harjo poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” a moving memory of her childhood kitchen table, all the familial richness that took place at the table. After reading the poem a couple of times and breaking it down to a phrase of a few words to all repeat and savor, I would ask the participants what they remember about their childhood kitchen tables. So many memories would come up. I’d write them down, all the various memories and input from the group. At the end of the session I’d read it—a collectively made poem. But, back to resident Tony from Brooklyn! One memorable visit—on my arrival, I said “Hey, Tony, how’s it going?” and he replied, “It’s been a good day, we hunted buffalo, we got one, skinned it, made a fire,”—and you just go with it. I said, “That’s awesome!” His and many others, their imaginations were so cool.

My last one to share today is about a woman named Bird who was 102 years old. One day she said to me, “During World War I, the government—.” Most people don’t have memories from World War II, let alone the first. She was 14, I think she said, and the government came to Oklahoma, where she lived, and took people’s mules to send them to Europe in the war. She was 102—and she was remembering at 14 years old the day some government representatives came and took her mule that she loved. 

RT: To hear about some of these experiences, and such specific moments is so interesting, and such an honor. I appreciate you so much for how thoughtful you’ve been with your responses today and how engaging you’ve been in this conversation. Thank you for this wonderful conversation, Joanne!

JDD: Thank you, Rachel. And thank you New Ohio Review for your support!

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Joanne Dominique Dwyer has two poetry collections: Rasa, chosen by David Lehman for the Marsh Hawk Prize (2022), and Belle Laide (Sarabande Books, 2013). She is a Rona Jaffe Award-winner and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Dwyer was also included in Best American Poetry 2019. She has been a visiting poet to elders with memory loss and, through support from the Witter Bynner Foundation, a poetry facilitator to adolescents in New Mexico. She is also a ceramics artist.