THR Interview Series: Danielle Rose
As the first entry in our interview series, our Editorial Director, Justin, spoke with the poet Danielle Rose about process, trauma, and tradition, as well as what she’s reading and writing. Her work can be found in The Shallow Ends, FIVE:2:ONE, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, at first & then, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Danielle is a Managing Editor at Dovecote Magazine.
She was kind enough to send us a brand new poem to pair with the interview, which can be found here.
Justin: One of the things that interests me personally, as a writer and editor, is the genesis of a writer's work. Specifically, where it comes from, or where writers think it comes from. Call it a muse, or inspiration, or whatever – but where does this stuff come from for you? And why do you do it?
Danielle: Writing, for me, has always been a compulsive act. It is something I either do or do not have to do. To paraphrase Bishop, I am a writer because I have to write. Which is deliciously tautological. There is a certain imperative about it. And probably a more complicated answer than bundling these feelings into something you could call a muse or an inspiration, which are just words we’re using to try to describe something that happens. Because ultimately everything we write is an idea. And I am using the tools available to me to make sense of the world I encounter and experience. I have studied poetry for the vast majority of my life, so my toolbox is full of poetry. This is perhaps an example of self-actualization.
Which is how I make a poem. By evaluating things. Every poem is a reaction to something. Some loss, some pride, some history, some need, etc.. I encounter something that I have to think about; some idea starts flying around my head and its excitability is a rhythm. So I make it dance.
J: A really pervasive idea is that belief which suggests that artists ought to have a hard time in some way. I have opinions about that, but the centrality of trauma or suffering in your work is pretty evident. How does hardship factor into your process?
D: I have ideas about my hardships, yes. I think most people do. They are our own in a way that they could never belong to another person. But I have a great distaste for the romanticization of trauma. And a great distaste for engaging with my own trauma, too. I write around it. The pieces in my chapbook, at first & then (as well as the majority of my currently published work,) were composed during a consecutive eight month period where I, a trans woman, was having a lot of ideas about my transition. I had come to a point where I had to explore what I was going through in a way that was not just my own rumination but a larger conversation between myself and society. It was very likely the way that I was able to resituate myself after a large deconstruction of one idea of self while a different self was still emerging; a wonderfully mundane reflection of what occurs inside a chrysalis.
But you asked about process. As I said, I write around trauma. I don’t like handling it or facing it. There is a Kerouac-like quality to a lot of my more explicitly confessional work insomuch as I get it “out” as quickly as I am able. Producing the raw material for a piece of writing is frantic and “automatic.” My instructors always hated this back in school.
But what should be stressed most is that I was in a position to be able to write about trauma because suddenly, it was over. I was sober and healthy for the first time in my life and I needed that sharpness to craft anything of external value—which is an inherent barrier when dealing with massively personal subject matter. I understand that most folks do not understand transness. This is fine for my purpose. I’m dancing around the topic just like my audience, most of the time. This cowardly skill, which is still skillful, of not creating discomfort. It likely speaks volumes that I’ll throw ideas at a reader without concern—yet it is so difficult to bring myself to address trauma directly and honestly. Which is the small pocket where I find myself working with poetry. All these ways to not say the things that happened as they happened. Ultimately, self-deception is as much an element of literature as anything else we discuss. My intent with each poem is to capture some of that self-deception. Or in a different way, to try to define the space I am inhabiting—be that space one formed of trauma or curiosity or any other set of arising conditions.
J: Talk a little bit about mentors. We've talked before really briefly about how very much you identify with a particular tradition, and how important that is. What is that tradition? What do you/did you get from it?
D: Throughout a very formative time in my younger writing life I was utterly saturated with a discourse of social justice and the poetry of witness. I gained so many things from this time, but ultimately it instilled a respect for the process of reportage—a thing poets have been concerned with for quite a long time already. Poetry operating as a means to record a history. Specifically the histories of those who would not be otherwise writing the histories. This is really a way to talk about oral tradition and the importance of remembering the things that happened. There is a way that the act of recording affirms the importance of living; maybe a map for how to never be without a way to say “I exist.”
The way power seeps into every interaction; that monsters inhabit bodies just like our own.
And in truth this is actually an explanation for why I do not write political poetry despite an (unseen, unpublished) history of doing just that. Understanding all of the above means that I understand my own work is primarily selfish in motivation. It is designed to make people look. But I am also engaging in a certain reportage. As a trans woman I certainly record a witness, but I discussed trauma before and that discussion is a kind of answer, too. I think I recognize that this is a part of that record even when I do not intentionally desire for it to be.
Which is all to say that whoever we are, we are always reporting something; always soaking in others’ reportage.
J: Imagine you're teaching an intro workshop. It's the first session, you know somebody's going to drop, maybe you'll never see them again. What's the one hard truth about the writing life you'd want them to know before they walk out the door?
This is a difficult question. It distills everything into a nail’s head and then you hand me a hammer.
Perhaps that writing is ultimately banal. That these skills are just a toolbox.
J: Tell me about your process. When you write and edit, do you shoot from the hip? Do you write off an observation? Or do you have a point of view in mind? This is kind of related to the first question, but less to do with where the poem comes from than how you actually start shaping it.
D: I hold audacity in high regard. Likely because I have little patience with things like process. This can be true of many things: grammar, lineation, the use of commas, etc..
“Sloppy” is a word I use to describe my process. Something comes from somewhere—usually a book, maybe a conversation; an observation; a headline—and then I begin to have ideas about the thing. If the ideas sound right and are pleasing, I’ll usually drop whatever I am doing to write them down as quickly as I possibly can as to not lose them. I write when I need to write. I revise when I need to revise. There is little conscious effort to maintain a certain schedule or set of methodologies. Work is done in bursts when it catches me and I tumble down in.
Which is to say I am always an open faucet and never a dried well when I approach composition. Why write when you do not want to? (This is, perhaps, why I am not a novelist. I would never finish anything.) But this is all a drive because ideas need to be worked through. Like Oppen I desire clarity from poetry. And like Oppen I find clarity elusive. But poems get close to something. Or are our best ways of trying to pin that something under a curious thumb. A poem is me working through an idea or set of ideas. Those ideas need to be spinning, and then I work them like a potter works clay—often discovering the thing I am making along the way.
J: Do you have anything you want to plug? Any shout outs or fun stuff? Tell us where we can find your work, who you're reading that you think we should be paying attention to–anything you want.
D: I tell everyone to read Lauren Berlant. So that. And Emily Wilson’s recent translation of the Odyssey is really superb. Anne Carson’s most recent effort, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, is spectacular but I say that about all Carson. I did very much enjoy the time I spent with Martin Corless-Smith’s Odious Horizons: Some Versions of Horace. I was lucky enough to be able to discuss the work with Tom Snarsky at length recently at Dovecote in a quite fruitful conversation concerning, amongst other things, translating Horace in the 21st century.
Forthcoming soon I have two collaborative poems in Empty Mirror with my amazing writing partner Bailey Grey; a piece in Pithead Chapel; a triptych I am extremely proud of that weaves Amelia Grey, Fulgentius the Mythographer and swimming at Walden soon in MORIA. I am very excited for that one. The best place to keep up with me is on Twitter @danirosepoet. Pre-orders for my debut chapbook at first & then from Black Lawrence Press open in the latter half of this year.
