Denise Duhamel Interview

1. Your work often varies between the traditional poem utilizing line breaks and stanzas and he prose poem, which focuses more on the use of the sentence. What guides you in choosing the format for the piece? You seem to write more in prose format. You’ve called yourself a hybrid poet. Can you explain what that means to those who may be unfamiliar with the concept?

DD: When I know what I am setting out to say, I tend to write in prose or narrative (sentences with line breaks). I may not wind up saying what I thought I was going to say, but if I do have a “story” of some sort, that’s the way it goes. There are many kinds of prose poems, including meditative, surrealist, fabulist etc. I like the form because it is so inclusive. If I am in more unfamiliar territory, subject-wise (that is, what seems to me unfamiliar), I like to work in forms, traditional and those I make up. In other words, I give myself a project.

2. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo American writers?

DD: Marjorie Agosin, Pablo Neruda, Ocatavio Paz, Ioana Ieronim, Wisława Szymborska

Any new writers that you are watching to see where they go?

DD: Stacey Waite is absolutely fantastic! She has a couple of chapbooks out and I can’t wait for her first book.

3. How does feminist criticism influence your poetry?

DD: Tremendously. I am a child of the Women’s Movement…It was actually COOL to be a feminist when I was in 6^th grade—that is, in 1973. So I embrace the movement and read a lot of feminist criticism and theory.

To elaborate on this, you have called yourself a feminist poet. What does that mean to you?

DD: I want to make women the subjects, not the objects, of my poems.

4. A two-part question:

It has been said that you push the “proverbial envelope.” You yourself have said that you like to break taboos in your work. With strong feminine voices like yourself discussing the role of gender, sex, money, etc do you feel there are still taboos out there to be broken?

DD: Yes!

Funny females were once taboo, think Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl. But you have been called witty, freewheeling, a writer with zany humor. I personally have been brought to tears by your hilarious humor. Do you find the world of poetry less accepting of funny female writers than male writers? What do you feel is humor’s role in poetry today and to come?

DD: As an undergrad, I was told that only “ugly” women can be funny. That is, women who don’t fit into the dominant culture have more to work with. Think fat, loud, etc. When I was in my twenties, I was intimidated by that statement. I didn’t want to have to exaggerate what was “wrong” with me, what was culturally unacceptable. But now I think that idea is changing—with people like Chelsea Lately who fits the norm of who is “pretty” and also hilarious. I think she’s opened up who can get a laugh. In poetry, we are not “seen” exactly on the page. But still, I think the idea of humor’s role in poetry is quite large, especially in terms of socio-political poetry. Satire and absurdity are important.

5. Your poetry so often speaks to bigger picture discussions like in Kinky and the poems Hispanic Barbie and Black Barbie History, in $600,000 from Ka-Ching!, and Why on a Bad Day I can Relate to the Manatee. Do you consider yourself a political poet? What do you see as poetry’s role in American politics, in creating change in American society?

DD: Yes. I do see myself as a political poet. Why not? I think poets should write about everything they want to write about. I think poetry is about making readers see the world differently and opening it up. Having said that, I don’t have an inflated idea of what poetry can “do.” I’m a realist.

6. Your work is candidly honest from relationship poems in Star Spangled Banner and especially in Ka-Ching where you discuss the tragic accident your parents were involved in when an escalator collapsed in 2003. I believe this seemingly open access into your life is why your work is so easy for readers to connect to. What influenced you to be so open with your readers especially in a world today when we are encouraged to be distant in order to protect ourselves?

DD: I was open and honest in my work from the beginning because, in all seriousness, I never thought anyone would really read it. I certainly never thought I’d be published. So now that people have read what I’ve written and no one throws tomatoes or boos, I feel emboldened to continue on that path.

7. In your interview with Karla Huston you discussed that at one point you had to get away from the “I poems.” In much of your latest book, Ka-Ching!, you revert back to the “I perspective.” What brought you back to this “personal narrative” as you called it like that in Smile and Star Spangled Banner?

DD: It was simply time, I think. I don’t think one way of writing is better than the other. I think it’s just a process—you reach the end of one road and turn down another. Then you make two lefts and you are back where you started.

8. After you received your MFA at Sarah Lawrence you have said that you decided that you were “in poetry” for the long haul. Do you think you will ever stop writing? What keeps you going?

DD: I love writing—I love the act of sitting down with a pad of paper or a journal or a laptop. It’s a way for me to connect with myself and with the world. I’ll stop, I suppose when I’m dead. Unless the dead are able to write.

9. Many of your books have a theme to them like with Kinky being about Barbie, (which I love by the way), Ka-Ching! focusing on money and your parents’ accident. Do you find that this way of compiling a book makes it easier to focus on the material or does it jut happen that way because of whatever is going on in your life or society at the time?

DD: I write a lot of poems and when I put a book together, I look back and see the themes—or try to see the themes. I didn’t set out to write a book about money, but when putting together Ka-Ching! I could see that had been an obsession. I knew I was going to write a book of Barbie poems at some point—I guess when I had twenty or so and wanted to keep going.

10. Many of the blog’s readers are active writers always looking for new ways to find inspiration. As a teacher of poetry and a successful writer with 10 books under her belt, would you mind sharing one or more of your favorite exercises to get those juices flowing?

DD: Get your hands on a copy of Joe Brainard’s I Remember and write your own list of “I remembers….” It almost always works

11. The final and toughest question: Would you mind sharing a poem or two with Formaldehyde’s readers?

DD: Sure! As you may know, I’m a big proponent of collaboration. Here is a poem my friend Haya Pomrenze http://www.hayapomrenze.com/author.php

and I just finished. Coincidentally, it’s called HYBRID.

HYBRID

The day we napped, I felt like a letter in an envelope—

an old-fashioned letter, pre text messages and the pillows

were not too hard, not too soft—just right.

The sleep lines on our faces made us look like lions

and tigers and bears chased our dreams

right through the snooze button. We woke up hungry,

clawed at the oranges we’d packed, the pith

of which reminded us of childhood when

it stuck in our teeth as we didn't know when to stop.

Oh bitter seeds of adulthood. We had two choices—

to believe in the tooth fairy and Santa

or Frank Sinatra and his throaty oath

though he wore a bowtie to hide his huge Adam's apple.

In kindergarten I relished naptime, the sticky plastic mat

smelled of juice, Crayolas and Sister Anne's breath.

In college your lumpy futon held you as you fantasized

about the Italian exchange student with suspenders, fiddled

with a yellow dildo you found on a rack at the Goodwill.

It was fruitless, reminding you of Ken who went

into the priesthood to avoid coming out. What I needed

was a guy who wrestled but romanced me with love letters

and garden vegetables he grew in his backyard. What did I know

then of ripe love, the kind when two people share a worn blanket

and post coital drool? You have slept in 276 beds (counting hotels)

and not once have you forgotten to say the Shema prayer, your hands

clicking rosary beads. You became to be a religious hybrid

when your housekeeper took you to Church of God on Palm Sunday, waving

her dusters like pompoms. In the pew, you read the forbidden missal

but there was no Amazing Grace or food after services.

I drew two triangles to make a Star of David, two lines to make a cross,

thought of Tiger Woods and his Buddhist roots.

Your paternal great-grandmother, you’re told, lived in Thailand

where she sold curried Challah, opened the first fusion

synagogue for Friday night meditation and matzo balls,

light as nirvana, personified. My maternal great-grandfather practiced voodoo

in Kenya poking dolls of his mother-in-law, a moled witch

known for her sour love potions of tree bark and umeboshi plums

she had long ago placed in her vagina for birth control.

The men in the village scorned her for her prunes of deceit, but the women

deified Mamachia. They came to her thatched home bearing gifts

of seashells that foretold the future. The women in our families have always napped,

with eyes wide open or wide shut. They summoned ancestral spirits

through feathers or foam, Craftmatic, Lazy Boys, hammocks—

their fingers brailing wisdom, like a Pillow Book.

John Murillo's Up Jump the Boogie

“And the Cap/Don’t really tell what’s inside the can. Kinda like the soul,/Que no?

~Santayana, The Muralist from Up Jump the Boogie, John Murillo

Up Jump the Boogie, John Murillo’s first collection of poetry, is a musical exploration of memory, childhood, and of all the drumbeats we hear along the way. His poetry takes the heart and soul of Los Angeles and composes his own symphony of the rhythms around him: the hissing of low-riders as they let out their air bags, the thump of bass, mariachis, the enmeshing of one language into another. Murillo’s orchestration of language, not just as words, but as rhythm, brings the music of the line to an entirely new plain. He creates his own musical California landscape by mixing the rolling drumbeats of our hills, the snare drums of our waves, the bass of a ball bouncing on the court, and booming it over the loudspeakers of the page. To feel the emotion in not only his narratives, but in the sounds he creates telling them makes this collection a unique exploration of what poetry can do on and off the page. The lines are his records, the page his turntable, and the readers, just his humble listeners to the mixes he compiles.

“Between breakbeats and bad breaks, broken homes

And flat broke, caught but never crushed. The stars

We knew we were, who recognized the shine

Despite the shade. We renegade in rhyme…”

-from Renegades of Funk, VII

Denise Duhamel Bio and Question Forum

I am excited to announce that the question forum is now open for one of my all time favorite poets, Denise Duhamel. She is an extraordinary poet, sincere and vulnerable with an uncanny ability to make her reader laugh out loud one minute and be in literal tears the next, or at least that is the affect she has on this poet. With every poem, I feel like I am sitting down in her living room chatting over a glass of wine. There is no distance between her and her reader. She is right there, opening the door into her life.

Her bio is as follows from www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/33 Here you can also find links to her poetry. 2 poems follow her bio. Post your questions for Denise as a comment to this blog and look for the answers to come from the poetess herself!!!

Denise Duhamel was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1961. She received a B.F.A. degree from Emerson College and a M.F.A. degree from Sarah Lawrence College.

She is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, most recentlyKa-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (2005), and Mille et un sentiments (Firewheel Editions, 2005).

Her other books currently in print areQueen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2001),The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999); Kinky (1997); Girl Soldier(1996); and How the Sky Fell (1996). Duhamel has also collaborated with Maureen Seaton on three volumes: Little Novels (Pearl Editions, 2002), Oyl (2000), and Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press, 1997).

In response to Duhamel's collection Smile!, Edward Field says, "More than any other poet I know, Denise Duhamel, for all the witty, polished surface of her poems, communicates the ache of human existence."

A winner of an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including four volumes of The Best American Poetry (2000, 1998, 1994, and 1993).

Duhamel teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, Florida.

From Kinky

Buddhist Barbie

In the 5th century B.C. 

an Indian philosopher

Gautama teaches "All is emptiness"

and "There is no self."

In the 20th century A.D.

Barbie agrees, but wonders how a man

with such a belly could pose,

smiling, and without a shirt.

Why, On a Bad Day, I Can Relate to the Manatee
The manatee tries a diet of only sea grass, but still stays fat.
Mistaking her for a mermaid from afar,
sailors of long ago lost interest when they got too close,
openly making fun of her chubbiness. She knows Rodney Dangerfield
would write jokes about her if she were more popular.
She's ashamed of her crooked teeth, her two big molars
that leave her sucking and grinding
with bad table manners. She swims towards danger
over and over, scars from motor boats on her back
reminders of her slow stupidness. She resents being
called a sea-cow. She hopes her whiskers don't show
in the light. She is the mammal who knows
about low self-esteem. I first met her on my honeymoon
in southern Florida. I was on a cruise in my one piece bathing suit.
The women in bikinis squealed and pointed to the nearby dolphins,
clapping so their sleek gray backs would come to the water's surface.
In the shadow of her prettier ocean sister, the manatee swam by also.
No one but I paid her much attention. I wanted to lend her
my make-up, massage her spine, lend a girlfriend-ear
and listen to her underwater troubles. I dreamt of her
as I slept in the warmth of my new husband. I dreamt of her
as he slept in the warmth of me. On a good day, too,
I can relate to the manatee, who knows
on some level that she is endangered
and believes in mating for life.
copied from and where more Denise Duhamel poems can be found:  http://capa.conncoll.edu/duhamel.smile.html#55