D.S. Waldman is the author of the poetry collection Atria (Liveright/WW Norton, 2026). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and many other publications. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and recipient of Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, Waldman lives and teaches creative writing in New York City. He’s at work on a novel.
From the Bryant Park subway station, I walk through Times Square, where I become a background figure, the scurrying woman you’d find in a Bruegel painting. It is cold as I thrust against a brutal wind toward 53rd and the looming façade of the Museum of Modern Art. I’ve come to walk and talk art with another poet, D.S. (Dan) Waldman. Waldman’s stunning debut collection, Atria, owes a partial debt to another museum, the San Francisco MOMA. Hours spent with the muses of Calder, Braque, and Man Ray elicited a volume of poems that journey beyond the ekphrastic to a place where art slips into the bloodstream of human experience, heightening the senses. A perfect state to be in, as there is art to see, and art and poetry to discuss. What follows is our conversation, condensed and edited to align with the various works of art we experienced.
We decide to start on the 5th floor (1880s to 1940s) and work our way forward in time. Which means pausing first before van Gogh’s iconic painting.
[Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. Saint Rémy, June 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 × 36 1/4″ (73.7 × 92.1 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange)]
Heidi Seaborn: When you see something famous, what does that do for you?
D.S. Waldman: Like Starry Night? Well, I’m definitely crowd-averse, so I see the crowd and back off. I’m also maybe a sucker for the canon. So, I look for what has drawn so many people to it over time, and try to get in touch with my own childlike impulses that usually guide me in a museum space, or guide me to a piece of art. I often, honestly, just look around the room, and it’s like, where’s the interest? If something calls to me, I’ll leap to it. It’s so funny in a room like this because, obviously, the van Gogh is here, and also there’s this lovely, minor landscape.
[Georges-Pierre Seurat. Evening, Honfleur 1886, Oil on canvas, with painted wood frame, 30 3/4 x 37″ (78.3 x 94 cm) including frame, Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy]
HS: The Seurat?
DSW: I also just love it, and love pointillism. It seems so tedious, this process, so I maybe admire that, because I know that I can never sustain that type of minute attention, the color-varied dots to eventually span out into something recognizable. In a museum, we’re experiencing art, and the context of the experience through what else is happening in the space. I think that is something that also excites me about art experiences—how affected they are by immediate context. There’s a constellation of experience.
We walk into the Picasso gallery.
[Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Paris, June-July 1907. Oil on canvas, 8’ x 7’ 8″ (243.9 x 233.7 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange)]
DSW: Today, for instance, we’re talking, at least in part, about my book, and the relationship between writing and art, and the process of looking at art and writing. Every time I come here and look at this exact same painting, I bring whatever is happening in my life, happening in the day. In some sense, the finished thing, which is in itself already so complicated, can be a prism through which all these other factors are filtered. I think that was something I was interested in trying to capture in the book—the piece itself, but also what’s going on in life, the world, the room, more immediately, and letting it be a place for all of those parts of life to be filtered, I guess.
HS: Yes. To me, what’s fascinating about your work is how it expands well beyond the ekphrastic to weave in everything in your life. The borders between the work of art, the experience of that art, and the art of living are all blurred in Atria. I’m curious about that, about turning your life into art, turning art into your life.
DSW: Because I grew up with a mother who is an artist (she’s an old process photographer and does other stuff, and my sister is a videographer, photographer), I never felt like I had the same knack for visual aesthetics as they did. Even though I studied art and art history in college. When it came to making, I just never had the same instincts, that childlike impulse to make a mark in a certain way that expresses both you, and whatever it is you’re trying to make on the paper, or the canvas or whatever. Once I meandered my way into writing, it felt like something interesting could happen. The language being the landscape, or the medium where I’m most dexterous, or comfortable, but filtered through the visual arts and architecture that I’ve spent so much time with. It already felt maybe like, I don’t know if the right word is “combinatory,” like a venue for combining media and experiences, if that makes sense. I had this experience with my mom at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There were these huge wall size artworks, probably three of them hung next to each other, called “Literal Drift,” all covered in wet cyan that the artist then threw buckets of water and silt onto from a body of water near Seattle.
HS: Puget Sound?
DSW: Yes. Puget Sound water and silt, buckets of it to move and manipulate the cyan, and the finished result is this crashing wave effect. It was unframed. Just the paper against the wall. My mom’s looking at it and walking close to it, away from it. Then she just goes up to it and touches it and lifts the back. The docent has a fit, and warns that if it happens again, she’s going to get thrown out. But an experience like that, just witnessing that the piece itself is already so interesting and moving, but then it’s seeing my mother, who has this long personal history with that medium, be curious about it. I think those experiences are so exciting and make the art itself more interesting.
HS: Like in your poem, “Calder”?
DSW: Yes, “Calder” has that same type of moment where the kid comes in and slaps the mobile, and it’s like, wow, putting the thing into motion, that makes so much sense to my childhood. There’s the “Calder” poem, and then “Calder: In Motion” which took its title from the name of a short three-part series event at SF MOMA, where they would put mobiles into motion in this very controlled way. They had this Q-tip-looking thing that they would very gently prod the mobile with. Those experiences, I think, are where it really comes alive for me.
HS: I’m curious where the poem starts for you, when drawn from a work of art.
DSW: Sometimes nothing comes that directly addresses a specific piece of art, but that aesthetic experience in some way will open a door for some other type of writing. Even if experiences didn’t necessarily result from an artwork, I think I gain a lot through osmosis, where different schools of art feed the writing well, in different ways.
HS: So, the art in a general way, but also in a specific way, becomes the entry point, the aperture for you?
DSW: Yes, I think that is a good way to describe it, where the piece of art is just the window through which all these other things become possible, rather than—I don’t know, more traditional ekphrastic poems where the world of the painting is the world of the poem. For my own writing, it’s much more like a portal into other possibilities, other topics, ways to draw out the autobiographical, or memory, other associations, or again, other types of writing and language.
The Cubist composition being transposed into writing, or thinking about the Pollock era, the abstract expressionist era, and how that was such a movement in New York at that time, when the New York School of Poets were also innovating language, and doing things much more expressively, and sometimes abstractly, and often citing a lot of those artists and artworks in their work. I’m interested in that too, which is very New York School-y, allowing the visual aesthetics to inform rhythm, or the various aesthetics.
HS: There are so many poets that are working in and around visual art, music. Perhaps we are in a New York School renaissance. Because Atria starts with “Calder” and ends with “Calder in Motion,” it got me thinking about movement, of course, also balance. I feel like there’s a great deal of interior and exterior balance in these poems.
D.S. Waldman with Calder sculpture
[Alexander Calder, Spider 1939, Painted sheet aluminum, steel rod, and steel wire, 6’ 8 1/2″ x 7’ 4 1/2″ x 36 1/2″ (203.5 x 224.5 x 92.6 cm). Gift of the artist.
DSW: Yes. On one hand, I do think that the book has a structure that implies some sort of balance or compositional unity. Like you said, it begins with “Calder,” roughly ends with Calder. The art poems are scattered somewhat evenly throughout the book. Likewise, the brother elegy prose poems are divided more or less evenly around the middle section, the essay and the sonnets.
I think that because there are so many related topics in the book, I can more easily identify the themes of loss, elegy that become the different throughlines in the book. To me, it was important to have a structure that implies relatedness, if that makes sense, a structural balance to contain or hold a pretty wide array of types of poems and subjects in poems and people in poems.
This is the first book I will have published, but the third, really, I will have written and revised. I prefer the mess of this book and the way that it more authentically represents my life. What you’re suggesting with your question, the way that grief, for instance, arrives in this book, in these poems, is often through the back door or the side door. Like the speaker is living their life walking around the lake, and they see somebody that opens the door for grief to enter, which is much truer to my experience than the Rilke style. Poems that begin in the feeling and end in the feeling. In my experience, these things are much more fleeting. These feelings of grief.
We pause in front of a massive Jackson Pollock painting.
[Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950, Oil and enamel paint on canvas, 8’ 10″ x 17’ 5 5/8″ (269.5 x 530.8 cm), Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund (by exchange)]
DSW: Going back to being a sucker for the canon, or at least being curious about the canon, there is something extra satisfying to being moved by something that is a very famous thing. I do feel that way about this Pollock.
HS: What effect does it have on you?
DSW: Maybe it puts me in touch with my own chaos, in a way, and gives permission for those parts of me to exist. I feel this, both with Pollock and Rothko, obviously achieved differently, but there is so much of their biography that I project onto these, where it’s like I know that Pollock is very troubled, and of course dying, sort of like a drunken, raging bar crash. I can see this hyper-masculine rage, or frustration, or heat, anyway. There’s something about being translated into canvas to me that it’s almost like a relief. It’s like, “Oh, you’ve left it on the canvas, and it’s no longer in the body, or it’s no longer in the human world,” even if that isn’t necessarily what happened biographically. That is the sense I get from it, this primordial heat or something that I also get in Rothko with the way that they almost seem to vibrate color or vibrate heat. I was in one of the LA museums, not LACMA, but the one down the street from it, the MOCA I think. They had a room of Rothkos arranged according to a color gradient. That was very intense. A whole room of—
HS: Rothko color forms. I clearly remember the first time I encountered Rothko’s work, “1984,” at the National Gallery. Just these huge walls. Life-changing. But of course, his work becomes darker and darker and darker as his depression sets in. It’s almost devastating to think of. And yet, it’s all there on the canvas.
DSW: Yes, where it’s like Rothko almost is getting buried under those layers of color or layers of tone, whereas this, it’s all being expressed or launched across the canvas. There’s so much rhythm in there, the Pollock painting. My mother was here two weeks ago for my book launch, which was really sweet. We went to the Met one day. I love seeing these paintings with my mom. They don’t have that much modern art there; it’s off in a quiet little wing, so you can often have time to yourself in front of these paintings. There’s a bench like this one here. She was tired, and she laid down on this viewing bench in front of “Autumn Rhythm.” My partner got a really lovely photo of her.
We have entered another gallery.
[Exhibit: Hard Edges, Expanded Fields. Work by Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and others.]
HS: All this geometric work is giving me anxiety, I think.
DSW: Interesting. Me, too. There’s something like the rigor required to achieve them, I feel when I’m looking at them.
HS: Does that mean we both crave and repel structure? I’m thinking about your sonnet crown “Low Theory,” how the speaker feels pretty close to the bone, and yet there is a fracturing of thought and language that seems very Cubist to me, so that I, as a reader, sense the poet’s obfuscation or distancing at the same time.
DSW: I think that’s probably true to some degree. Both the personal instinct, like when you’re in conversation with somebody and you catch yourself talking a lot about yourself, and you deflect. You ask how the other person is doing. You turn the lens away from yourself. I think, even though it wasn’t a conscious decision, that probably factored into the middle section of the book, which is an essay, a little bit of the prose in the book, it’s the most distant style of prose. The tone is more critical. The sonnets, to some degree, are trying to get as close to the bone as writing can manage to the experience of losing use of my dominant hand, switching to the left, it’s not one that I understand in terms of physiological details. I only have my embodied experience, which is very much one of confusion and fracture and something I don’t totally have linear language for. Even though I think those sonnets do create a little bit of distance from the narrative eye, in another way, I think they come as close as I could in language to conveying and capturing that embodied experience.
HS: To that point, “The Lake” poem is the only place, I think, that references your own depression. It’s just swimming in the middle of “The Lake,” and that’s it. Why just a glance?
DSW: It was the last poem I wrote for the book. In some ways, I think it’s the thing that was missing from the book and the thing that contextualizes the voice and the tone, but also, the thing that more closely relates the speaker to their brother. Whereas, without that poem, it would be like, “oh, this speaker had a brother who was the troubled one, and now they’re gone, and the speaker is trying to make sense of it.” What is truer to my lived experience is that these people were actually very similar. One of them is gone and the other is still here. Also, I think it particularizes the grief, maybe, that both of these people were riding that line of being here or not, and one just happened to cross the line, and the other didn’t. It is a very important poem for the book for that added context.
[Exhibit: Photo-Secession with works by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Frederick H. Evans, Paul Strand and others.]
HS: The use of photography is also critical to the book. Photographs, and Polaroids in particular, crop up often in your poems as obvious interplay between the act of taking a photograph and capturing memory. In the poem “On Photography,” the Polaroid camera is a device that not just captures memory but reveals truth. Even the prose poems evoke the Polaroid format and the way a Polaroid slowly reveals its subject.
DSW: Maybe in part, it’s related to the pressures of lyric and how the nature of the lyric eye is one of revelation. The speaker reveals something about themself to the reader. That’s what that whole mode hinges on. I think I’m just a little bit shy and maybe need the lens pointed somewhere else first so that I can almost speak over the footage or something from the background. There’s this lovely Chantal Akerman film called “News from Home.” She lived in New York for a few years in the ’70s. The film is basically these long cuts of just New York cityscapes during different times of day, different parts of the city. Sometimes the camera will be totally still. Another time, she’ll be filming out the back of a cab as it’s going. You’ll just get a stream of city stuff. Over it, she is reading aloud letters she received from her mother over the course of those years. Even though I saw the movie after I wrote the book, I think there is something of that happening in the book where in order for me to feel comfortable speaking, comfortable revealing, I needed that footage to speak over, contextualize, vibrate against. Rather than just the pure lyric utterance of, “this is what’s up with me right now.”
[Dance (I)Paris, Boulevard des Invalides, early 1909, Oil on canvas, 8’ 6 1/2″ × 12 9 11/16″ (260.4 × 390.4 cm), Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.]
HS: Is there anything that you feel people are getting drawn to in your book that’s surprising?
DSW: I’ve been really satisfied with what people are getting from it. The one thing that seems less central to others’ reading is that there’s a lot of love and lovers in the book. I think that sometimes gets lost or maybe is treated as scenery. When I was first writing this book, it didn’t have any of the brother stuff in it. It was really more a book about relationality and romantic relationships. There were some family poems with parents and then the middle section was still there. It was much more intent on examining those types of relationships. But then I added seven big chunky brother elegies to it, which I think was important to the book, but also almost took a lot of the attention away from the love and lost love that is in the poems.
HS: To me, the book is full of relationships and love. There’s the brother and parents and lovers and friends. It’s just this rich stew of life and the people we travel through life with.
DSW: I’m glad you’ve read it that way because that feels important to me. The art writing, the middle section of the book, the brother stuff, all of that is, of course, super important because it’s how the speaker both presents themself and better knows themself through these relationships with people. Most of the brother elegies, the elegiac part of those poems is often incited through the beloved. It’s the beloved looking at the photos on the fridge, which leads to this memory. Or it’s the lover at the restaurant who is talking about time that brings a revelation that the speaker is now older than their older brother. There’s this inter-relationality in the book that I hope people get from reading it.
HS: For me, your book’s got that whole rich, messy life experience in a frame of time. To use the idea of a Polaroid, to me, it’s like a series of Polaroids taken over a time period, and while it hearkens to the past, it also envisions the future. Atria is really a luminous lyric collection of poems about life and love. Dan, I’m so grateful to have had this time to talk about your work and to share an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art with you.
DSW: Thank you, Heidi. It’s been wonderful.
