Is there a connection between the practice of meditation and the poems in Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? You refer to meditation or spiritual awareness in several places.
The opening poem is called “Meditation.” I wanted a push and pull, a tension throughout the book, between the struggle to get quiet, to be present, and the always-agitated, moving-around mind of the speaker(s). I wanted to get that mind onto the page, not just in the act of thinking, but in the process of perceiving; consciousness, with all its distractions, the many kinds of interruptions.
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| Poet Donna Masini |
There are recurrent themes in your book of parents and family. Both the speaker’s mother and father appear in a number of poems. How did your grappling with your parents’ aging or end of life shape this collection?
The death of my father, the illness, gradual loss of memory, and death of my mother—I can’t begin to say how these experiences changed me. Writing the poems in this book, these losses came into everything. And then a huge part of the few last years has been taken up, not only with caregiving, watching my parents decline, which of course brings up all the future losses—my friends, my own mortality—but also dealing with all the “stuff.” Going through my parents’ things, confronting my mother’s urge to save. My urge to save. My father and brother are the opposite. My brother walked around my mother’s apartment throwing stuff out—and I followed, pulling it out of the garbage, carrying bags of costume jewelry, potato peelers, report cards home with me on the bus to Port Authority. Those conflicts, dynamics, and tensions are behind the book. This is something many of us go through or will go through. And then I tend to have a memorializing mind, caught up in loss and time: Is this the last time I’ll read Villette? Was that the last time she’ll wear that jacket? In one poem the speaker says, “Today I wrote the word always and felt afraid. So much less of always now.”
Well, let’s think about the ways in which we move through the world. I have to pick up Advil and I’m thinking about what to do in class tonight, what my mother said last Christmas, the awful pop-up alert that just surfaced, why did my cat throw up? The smell of coffee I just passed, Gaza, fascism, my pounding headache and what to make for dinner. The problem is how to arrange the various strands in a poem, the rhythms, music, tones; how to capture the movements of thought, unconscious associations. When it comes to emotional impact, as important as these details are, it’s about shaping the rhythms the reader will ride, suspending a sentence to ratchet up the tension. The surprising turn or swerve the reader didn’t expect (I didn’t expect) that catches their breath, or takes it away.
There is a self-mocking humor in your book that allows you to disarm the reader and make serious statements. You even use silly but very amusing puns at times. How do you view the role of humor and word play in your writing?
I remember Audre Lorde saying that I was really funny, so why didn’t my humor get into my poems, then pointing to a line (a dreadful pun) saying, “and this isn’t the way to do it.” It took a while for me to be able to integrate my humor—which is a huge part of who I am, how I think —into the poems. It’s something I talk about with students. You don’t want a one-liner—but there are lines that prove me wrong because of what they do tonally. My friend Daniel accuses me of inventing etymologies. I can’t help it. Word play comes naturally. In real life, I have to know when to suppress it, no matter how good it is, at, say, a funeral, or if it will hurt someone. But I can always put it in a poem. I think if everyone kept notebooks most of us would have pages of these kinds of observations. It’s the humor of quirky thinking, leaning slightly to the surreal, the hyper-literal or absurd. I love the absurd. (I mean, really, how can we possibly face the world now without it?)
Several of the poems in this book are overtly political, for example, “Psalm,” which deals with the environmental crisis, using biblical language. How do you avoid the pitfalls of being didactic or prosaic in a poem that has an overt message on a contemporary issue?
The easy answer is, I don’t publish a lot of it. I write so many more poems of every kind that just don’t work. For “political poems” the problem is “writing about.” The particular poem you mentioned—“Psalm”—went through many drafts, because I kept writing about. It’s only when someone mentioned they were writing a psalm that I thought, oh I can speak in the voice of the fish, in the language of psalms, try to enact their suffering. Then the poem began to emerge. I did so much reading about bunker fish the poem was getting information heavy. I had to cut a lot. A poet I was reading as I worked on this book is Wislawa Szymborska. She’s amazing. A lot of it has to do with her tone. (The rest is her brilliance.) Then there’s our mutual friend, June Jordan, who was able to write in the moment out of the crisis. Early on Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us taught me about point of view and perspective, poems of witness. How to not be “the good guy.” What I’m trying to do now is find ways to respond to daily headlines in poems. Right now they are filled with rage and dread. I’m beginning each poem with “Dear America.” Most are still in my notebook and might never see the light of day.
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
