HOW IT FEELS TO BE IN IT: An Interview with Dara Barrois/Dixon
Joey Rooney: Your poems include a keen interest in chance and fate and a recognition that human behavior involves complicated adjustments. In what ways do you find yourself exploring these themes in your poems?
Dara Barrois/Dixon: Chance has us in its grip. Fate’s a foregone conclusion. We humans, we never stop staying in character no matter what chance and fate deliver. Fate’s knotted up with faith. Faith’s true life gives us hope. Hope’s bound to be dashed. To be dashed comes with the territory. Thank goodness poetry’s around to help handle all these complications.
Chance gets mixed up with superstition and with wishful thinking. There’s the roll of dice to combine chance and fate for us, and in some ways, the turn of a page, or the shape of a sentence, each step in a story, each line or turn in a poem, all these depend on chance, choice, and what’s going on around each of us and all of us at any given time.
What we make up and put down in writing seems to say, okay chance, okay fate, I’ll live with you. Show me what you’ve got. Show me something. And I’ll keep a close eye.
This faith in chance can backfire, though so can anything and everything else. So-called rationality backfires just as well, all the time, all you have to do is listen to us.
It makes me think of people using a book to make a choice for them. Maybe I have one book I always do this with, maybe I like that choice to be random. Say I’ll choose a random page, put my finger on a word and let that word somehow tell me what to do.
It’s kind of wonderful how we do things like this with words right from when we first encounter them. Right from the start we sense their powers.
I like how you sneak my poem title (“Human Behavior Involves Complicated Adjustments”) right in there with your question—with recognition, recognition is such a great word—ignition, cognition and repetition all wrapped up in one.
I’ll take my chances with, chances are, chance of rain or snow or sleet or storm, any chance?—chance of a lifetime, in every instance some new human emotional complex comes up out of common phrases and there’s always a fateful encounter.
Fate though is another story. I think I’m always trying to say to fate, hey, I recognize your superpowers, I respect them, could you go a little easier on us, please, just maybe for a little while, just now and then. Fate’s cruel. Fate’s heartless, at least as far as I’ve been able to see.
JR: In an online poetry reading for NEOMFA students and faculty that took place in November 2022, you emphasized that, in your writing, you sometimes choose to forfeit the image for straightforward statements. What does this forfeiture of image for statement entail, and what purpose does it serve?
D B/D: Such a complicated, difficult question. I don’t know if you or I used “forfeit” in that admission, supposition, conjecture—though I like it fine, it brings with it a gravity I like feeling when a choice is made. Maybe what I wish were, and maybe suspect is, also true is that my making an arbitrary distinction between image and statement just isn’t complex enough for words in a poem or how words act in poems.
Images and statements, however someone chooses to define them—in a poem either alone or both together will defy anyone’s defining and any expectations that defining carries along with it.
What happens to words alone and together in a poem can’t be predetermined, determined, expected or excepted, pinned down or explained. Not by anyone who loves the mysterious something poetry has always been. Of course, poetry’s always the most forgiving thing there is, so if someone starts trying to explain it, poetry accepts that as well.
To make it plain, so long as enough poets have the good sense to ignore it when people flash that bogus warning alarm SHOW DON’T TELL I suspect it’ll all work out. That order—it sounds like a shouted order to my ears—it really hurts people who are trying to write something, maybe to save their lives. Anything that makes someone afraid to put something into words in any way inhibits and sometimes ends hope. With one big qualification—there do exist a lot of things better left unsaid, so many things that deserve questioning—though it’s difficult to question what can’t be seen.
And another thing, those 3 little words—don’t, show, tell—can start people down the road of believing poets never say what they mean, and that is not a good road, that road leads to nowhere poetry is welcome.
JR: You also spoke of your poems as demonstrating or embodying a “ritual of form.” How does this ritualistic impulse manifest itself in your poetry?
D B/D: Once I choose to write exclusively in a length of say, 14 lines (Your Good Thing, Is a Citroen Xsara Braque even imaginable?) or in 9-line 9-stanza sets (Reverse Rapture) sticking with that choice influences just about every other choice I make as I write along the way: tone, sound, syntax, everything. Let’s say a form whether it feels arbitrary or inevitable can be like a rope over a flimsy bridge over a raging river, something to hold on to as you move along.
It’s a luxury to see the end of a sonnet coming up ahead, it causes everything to slow down, maybe gets me to shift gears so as to not spin out over a cliff in a hair-pin turn, and get ready to stop the poem, somehow.
Ha, you get the idea. I think making a poem is a pretty dangerous thing to do.
I like that feeling, I’ve never flown a plane but I imagine many landings feel fairly good, especially when no one gets hurt. I know I like it very much when a pilot can handle a good landing.
I also feel that if I give some initially arbitrary formal choice a chance, and keep working within it, eventually I get to know it, how it feels to be in it, what it does, what it can or might do. I think I need to write at least a dozen, two dozen poems in any given way, shape or form before I start understanding its advantages, and then I begin to be surprised more and more by what it can do.
The more I see it can do, things I hadn’t yet begun to imagine. I like that feeling. I’d call that turning repetition into ritual.
In extreme circumstances repetition results in an uncanny transformation that shows me something I could have never willed into existence.
JR: You have said, perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that your one self-imposed rule of content moderation is that you refuse to inscribe in your poetry the name of anyone who does not deserve to appear there! This makes sense, I think! But what kind of sense? Is the power of poetry such that the simple act of naming becomes (as with a blessing or an incantation) risky, precarious, unpredictable?
D B/D: I’m not so sure I say that tongue-in-cheekly, I’ve always wondered why anyone would put the name of someone who has threatened, harmed, hated, undercut, hurt, demeaned, personally, politically, cruelly, wantonly, unless one is making a list in a poem of all those who fit that bill or unless one is somehow holding a person publicly responsible for all time in poetry’s sacred space—I don’t see doing so without a lot of thought, a lot of intention that seems necessary. There are plenty other public spaces to hold someone accountable if one chooses todo so.
You ask… what kind of sense—and I believe I agree you can be blessing who or what goes in a poem, you can be calling up a name… and I’ve seen beautifully made poems in which someone forgives trespass, or hideous crime, and maybe that is also one of poetry’s powers and practices—to witness and to judge and to offer a place for eternal damnation or eternal forgiveness to be found, or something in between.
JR: Forgive me for forging an association in my mind between your observation that the act of sending out or publicizing private writing changes this material and your recollection that, as a child, you used to put poems in bottles and throw these into a river. I wonder: Did the bottles ever float back to shore? Can poetry return to its source, its author? And, in returning, does poetry change yet again?
D B/D: I’m sure poetry returns to its source, only by being in the minds of others, mostly strangers it returns changed in the poet’s eyes. I don’t see how it can’t. Once others read something your understanding can include an understanding of how many different ways people take something, take it in, add their own thoughts into the mix, in all likelihood almost none of which you’ll ever know. That may not only be okay but good, being involved with and having thoughts about too many opinions and thoughts others have because of something you’ve written just isn’t all that good for a writer, at least in my opinion, at least not unless you can keep a pretty strict barrier between what you hear others say and what you are doing.
And it’s also true, if you give the poem away, or send it out in the world, it’s really not only your own any longer, and that’s okay, too. Why would you send it out into the world if you didn’t want to share it with other people? Or if you don’t trust the poem to fend for itself out there in the wild?
And no, once I threw a bottle out, not a one has ever come back. However, I liked this very much when I learned it, if those bottles survived at all it’s possible they joined the Gulf Stream as it rounded the Florida keys and turned north to head up the Atlantic coast, where now that I live near the Atlantic there’s a very very very slim chance something might turn up, if I take enough walks on the Atlantic coast. Dream on, is what I say to that.
JR: In your work as an editor for Factory Hollow Press, what do you find exciting, challenging, inspirational?
D B/D: I love reading new poems and seeing that there are many reasons why many people write them. You never know when something will show up that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before
Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier) is the author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022). Other titles include In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2014), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council have generously supported her work. Limited editions include (X in Fix)(2003) from Rain Taxi’s brainstorm series), Thru (2019) and Two Poems (2021) from Scram, and in 2022, Nine Poems from Incessant Pipe. With James Tate, she rescued The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke, published by Waiting for Godot Books. Poems can be found in Granta, Volt, Conduit, Incessant Pipe, Biscuit Hill, blush, can we have our ball back, Itinerant, American Poetry Review, Octopus, Gulf Coast, and The Nation. She’s been poet-in-residence at the University of Montana, University of Texas Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah; she was the 2005 Louis Rubin chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She lives and works in factory hollow in Western Massachusetts.
Joey Rooney is a writer of fiction and poetry and a student in the NEOMFA Program. Born and raised on the west side of Cleveland, he received his MA in English from Case Western Reserve University and his MA in Theology and Religious Studies from John Carroll University.