We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with two-time Poet Laureate Ada Limón (Startlement, The Carrying) about the ethereal playfulness of Emily Dickinson, and Whiting Award recipient Rickey Laurentiis (Boy With Thorn, Death of the First Idea) about the racism and “supreme fiction” of Wallace Stevens.
Ada Limón on Emily Dickinson
Why do you think Emily Dickinson had such a major impact on poetry?
I think that she's such a significant poet for numerous reasons, but one of them is that she was creating an idiosyncratic music all her own. She was breaking away from the metered, rhyming, heavy-footed verse that most people were writing at the time. I also think that she was focusing on a language that was much more ethereal and internal, versus the work of someone, say, like Whitman, who was really a public voice, a really expansive outpouring, a voice of abundance. And in many ways, her work was the private, imbued with a symbology that made it more mythic.
Do you think her work is still relevant today?
She's not only still relevant, but I think in many ways has had somewhat of a resurgence. The mystery of her life and who she was continues to haunt many of us. There's only one known photo of her, for example. But I think that there are a lot of young readers and young poets and prose writers that are drawn to not just the story of who she was and her biography, but that wildness in her poetry, and that braveness to create some kind of mysterious lyricism that I think is so relevant today.
When I was first getting to know her as a poet, it was at the time where we thought of her as this recluse who stayed at home and never left. And then if you go to her home in Amherst, it's bright, it has tons of light, it has good windows, and almost every day she was going for these really long walks with her enormous dog named Carlo. I remember thinking, Wait, she had this big dog named Carlo—she wasn't alone at all! As a writer who spends a lot of time alone with my dogs, it struck me as a different way of viewing her as a real, living woman. Someone who was finding joy and going out into nature, as opposed to a sullen, solitary, shadowy figure working by candlelight in the midst of a storm.
We live in a time when poets often write grand, book-length works, but she was the queen of short, impactful lines and poems. What do you think about her brevity?
I'm a fan of concision. I'm a fan of abundance. I'm a fan of them both. And I think that all artists should get the opportunity to play around with both abundance and brevity. But I think what she was doing with concision and brevity is allowing for the unknown to seep into the lines, into the stanzas, into the line breaks. Those dashes that leave room for the reader to enter. And so, for me, that concision feels precise. It feels purposeful. And I think it points to a type of brain that is interested in not only the image, but the silence that surrounds the music of the poem.
I feel like her tendency to imply much and say little lends her work this almost uncanny feeling, even though there’s nothing supernatural about it at all. There is a ghost but there isn’t, if you get what I’m saying.
Yes. And I think that because she makes room for the uncanny, there is a level in which all of her poems contain the surrealness of what it is to be alive in a human body in a certain time. And I think we can all relate to that. Whitman would spell that out for you. He would say, "I contain multitudes," and there was a sort of wild madness to trying to describe the strangeness of being. She's trying to describe the strangeness of being by allowing for those synapses to show in the work. You make the connection. Here's an image, here's a line, here's this language. And then inside of it is perpetuating the strangeness.
What can writers learn from her?
One of the biggest things that I think of when I think of her work is how much she was playing. There's so much in our lives right now that is serious and hard and complicated and difficult—the news and the horrors—and I think that sometimes when we go to the page, we forget that it's also a playground. And I think that what she was doing was experimenting and creating and saying, ‘What if I did this? What if I wrote a line like this?’ And she gives us permission to say, ‘What if I did this? What if I surprised myself? What if I tried this?’ I think that's the lesson for us: to keep experimenting and to keep playing.
She will surprise you. She will make you think about things differently. And she will allow you to see the world anew. And that’s what poetry does. It allows us to re-see, and to reimagine, and to experience the world in a new way. And I think she is one of the best at that.
Rickey Laurentiis on Wallace Stevens
Why Wallace Stevens?
In my first book, Boy with Thorn, I wrote a pretty significantly long poem in conversation with him, in conversation with a poem called Like Decorations in the Nigger Cemetery. When I first came upon that poem, I was in grad school, and I was startled, for obvious reasons. I was startled at the flippancy of the phrase, because as you read the poem, the long poem, it has really nothing to do with that title. So that felt even more racist, because it was like, why even use that title?
I follow this Brazilian manifesto—I'm making a little bit of a tangent—called Antropófago, where they were reinterpreting and revamping racist ideas about the Brazilian native. And the manifesto basically says, take everything, eat from the colonizer, digest it all, and reflect it back into the world. And so I still have that mindset. I'm very voracious as a reader, even though I think Wallace Stevens was a product of his time and was supremely racist. He has a line where he's like, “Solange, the magnolia to whom I spoke, a nigger tree with a nigger name”—he's obsessed with this figure of the dark.
That being said, what's nice about him is his forays in imagination, and how he would place that within his work. He was the vice president of an insurance company, and he has a mind and a way with language that reminds you of law. And so, having those three things buttress each other, where you have this supremely racist sensibility, coupled with explorations of the imagination, and coupled with pragmatic syntax of a lawyer—all that combines to make Wallace Stevens. I came across this society called the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, and that's really how I feel. I feel like if we were to meet we would be a friend and enemy.
When you think of poets you typically imagine some offbeat artistic lifestyle. What do you make of Stevens working as an insurance executive?
I kind of admire it, because I feel that there needs to be more poets in the world. I feel like poetic thinking is owed to the world, and sometimes it feels fenced off in ivy towers off in academia. He was the vice president of an insurance company—it doesn't get any more banal than that. I just want a regular job. It's like doing the dishes. I sometimes enjoy doing the dishes because it allows my mind, while my hands are moving in a robotic way, to launch into other stratospheres. In that way, it's a useful example.
That being said, it's also hard. It's difficult because you actually do have a job. And it's not as forgiving as academia, where you have a summer, sabbaticals, a committee who understands that you're smart and weird. People at your job don't necessarily care about that. They just want you to get the work done. So Wallace Stevens, I can forgive him in those terms, because he was just working. He was a product of his time, and that's not to excuse him—it's to put the whole time to pressure. To put the whole time under my heel and say, why was it so flippant?
In one poem he refers to poetry as the supreme fiction. What do you think he meant by that?
We're given in our American society to see the poem as a kind of memoir-lite, where the speaker of the poem is probably the poet themselves. If they divvy up some confessional tones, you take those as real. For me, supreme fiction reminds me to remember that I can lie in a poem. Or it may not be exactly a lie, but it's a fiction. You necessarily have to create these fictions to sustain a lyric, but also a poetic career, because eventually you get tired of yourself. You get tired of your own story.
One thing that title and that phrase brings up—and we forget this sometimes—is that poetry presupposed fiction. If we remember, poetry started all of this. Poetry's been here for millennia. Poetry, dance, painting—novels come out of us. They come out of the epic tradition. Short stories come out of us. We are mother. That is a reminder to know that poetry is that supreme figure. Sometimes publishing forgets that.
