A Conversation with Michael Dumanis
BY CAMILLE GUTHRIE
Michael Dumanis was born in the former Soviet Union and lived there until his parents were granted political asylum in the United States. His most recent book is Creature (Four Way Books, 2023). He is the author of one previous collection, My Soviet Union, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. The recipient of the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, he lives in Vermont, where he teaches at Bennington College and serves as editor of Bennington Review.
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Camille Guthrie: Please tell us why you chose this remarkable cover art by Simen Johan, Untitled #136 (Foxes), and why you titled the book Creature?
Michael Dumanis: Simen Johan is my favorite contemporary photographer! Twenty years ago I was working at Brazos Bookstore in Houston and his collection of photographs, Room to Play, consisting of evocative and disturbing images of children, looking at once self-confident and vulnerably lost, often with digitally manipulated, somewhat terrifying eyes, was prominently displayed on a shelf over the register. Its cover image became the cover image for my first book of poems, My Soviet Union, a child in a slip and fur coat and Russian-style hat clutching a camera in an urban snowfall at twilight. I liked the idea of linking that book with the new one by featuring an image of Simen’s again. In his more recent work, Simen has continued to produce unsettling images of creatures, only the creatures are now animals. I was especially drawn to his photograph of two foxes, seated in a humanlike posture and weeping, with traces of blood on their mouths, amid a desolate though beautiful snowscape, the sky and the ground essentially the same color, the lively orange of the foxes’ fur blaring at the center of the nothingness.
I think the knowledge that I am a mortal creature surrounded by other creatures, human and otherwise, offers a kind of certainty for me that few things do. The first poem in the book, “Natural History,” came out of a date I once went on with a puppeteer in Cleveland, Ohio. After a few awkward silences, I asked, “What are your puppets like?” The puppeteer responded, “They’re fully posable leather and clay creatures.” So the first poem of Creature, a kind of auto-creation narrative, begins, “I’m fully posable, a leather and clay creature / with the capacity to waltz and do the Twist.” The various speakers in the book keep interrogating what it ultimately means to be a creature, self-confident but also kind of lost.
CG: Did you write most of the poems while you were teaching at Bennington College—commuting between Brooklyn and the campus for eight years, and now living in Vermont? And, how has moving to the country affected your poems?
MD: While a couple of poems, including “Natural History,” originated in Cleveland, before I started teaching at Bennington, yes, most of the book was written, slowly, since I’ve been here. I came up with a lot of the individual lines I use in the poems while driving. Moving to the country has provided my poems with a landscape and sensory texture completely different from Brooklyn and Cleveland. Vermont is all over the book, in the mountains and lakes and the dominant fog.
CG: While reading the poems in Creature, I kept thinking: how, how does he create this persistent sadness, in poems that are also witty, formally delightful, and charming? Michael, how? I’m thinking of the end of “Natural History,”—a song of self, love, creation:
You are happy
But the tree dies. So I take out a patent
On the synthetic tree, and I carve
Your initials, my lover, into its torso,
And take you to the disco and the roller derby,
To the waterfall beside the paper mill.
It’s so amazing what we get to see.
The ruins extend across the valleys, toward each sea.
MD: Thank you, Camille. That’s nice of you to say. I have been trying to include that business about the tree dying because someone carved their lover’s initials into it in a poem since 1994. I was taking an incredibly difficult undergrad class called “Poetry: A Basic Course” with the poet and critic Allen Grossman, and I zoned out for a moment, only to regain my focus as Grossman was asserting, the context totally lost on me, “A man carves his lover’s initials into the bark of a tree. The lover is happy. And the tree dies.” And the last line you quote is actually something the poet James Galvin said to me once about the overpoweringly desolate beauty of a particular Italian town filled with Etruscan ruins.
I think I have always been at my happiest listening to sad songs. There is that Alfred Tennyson poem, “Mariana,” where the title character despairs at being stood up for a lifetime, each stanza ending with a version of: “She only said, ‘My life is dreary, / He cometh not,’ she said; / She said, I am aweary, aweary / I would that I were dead!” I find Mariana’s self-pity rather hilarious and comforting and true to life, to repeat those awful words over and over while continuing to be alive, living to despair for another day. I tend to especially like literature that is hilarious and clever and gutting and a bit off-kilter at the same time: Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita and Heinrich Böll’s novella The Clown, Suzan-Lori Parks and Ionesco and Beckett, Donald Barthelme, The Dream Songs by John Berryman, the sonnets of Terrance Hayes, the poems of Kim Hyesoon and Timothy Donnelly and Dorothea Lasky. Hamlet and King Lear.
CG: Does this pervasive sense of loss—perhaps the experience of feeling like an Other—originate in your experience immigrating to the U.S. from Russia when you were five years old? As in the heart-busting poems “Checkpoint” and “Audit” and “American Enterprise.”
MD: Being an immigrant is what I find most central to my identity, and I feel a common bond with anyone who had the experience of permanently leaving one country for another, especially if the departure did not feel entirely optional. I am an immigrant before I am anything else, something I felt acutely during the recent Trump years, so while a poem like “The Kidnapped Children” may be in dialogue with Louise Glück’s “The Drowned Children,” it is also preoccupied with the brutal family separation policies unleashed by Donald Trump against migrants, in which the government actually lost track of some of the children it kidnapped; and the poem “Checkpoint” originated when I physically recoiled from the image of an American officer shooting tear gas across the border at a migrant woman with children. What right do we have to tell a person that they can stand on one side of a river but not the other, just because of where they happened to be born? What is that all about?
I have a skeptical view of the concept of borders, these imaginary lines we create on the globe to decide who gets to live in what part of the world under what conditions. In my case, as a Soviet refugee, I come from a country that no longer exists, that one literally can’t return to. Growing up I never felt rooted to a particular place and would stumble when asked where I’m from. A lot of the poems in the book interrogate the notion of home, and are interested in enacting various modes of dislocation and displacement. I’m also inherently interested in the effect of the environment of a place on its inhabitants, who in the poems are usually just passing through, their coordinates becoming temporary states of mind: Nebraska; East Liverpool, Ohio; Cleveland; a cloud forest in Costa Rica; a lake in Vermont.
I think it’s central to my understanding of myself as a poet that I was fluent in Russian before I spoke any English. I approach English as the bilingual speaker of an acquired language. Everything I say and write in English gets translated in my head into a Russian analog, and I am often thinking about Russian diction, syntax, and idiom when writing in English. This opens up possibilities for how a sentence is structured or enjambed which might not occur to me if I weren’t thinking of English as a more flexible system than a typical native speaker probably does. Because I keep involuntarily translating back and forth, I am always thinking in language about language, and never really know where I’m headed until I arrive.
CG: You’re one of those remarkable people who can switch (in person, in poems) quickly from hilarity to sorrow with total sincerity. The epigraph from Victorian nonsense poet Edward Lear’s “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear” is a perfect choice for the book:
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
A register of irony and sincerity appears in many of the poems, such as the witty “Autobiography,” in which every word in the couplets begins with the letter “A,” such as “Am, as an animal, // anxious, Appendages always aflutter, / am an amazing accident. Alive.”
MD: I love how Mister Lear in Lear’s poem weeps uncontrollably all over the place, but then just puts himself together in the next line and gets to feast on shrimp and pancakes. When I first read his poem, I thought (and hoped) that he was buying large pieces of shrimp-shaped chocolate, or even shrimps dipped in chocolate, but alas, “chocolate shrimps” are just a dark-brown breed of shrimp.
I wonder if I’m informed a bit by a distinctly Soviet sensibility, as well as by an appreciation of a deadpan tone in American poets like John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Tate, C.D. Wright, Matthew Rohrer, Heather Christle, Natalie Shapero, and Sabrina Orah Mark. I’m drawn to irony, which gets an awful rap sometimes, because I see it as a sincere and genuine approach to understanding the complexities of the world.
Everything is a little funny and everything is a little sad and everything is kind of absurd but here we are rolling along with it, and so much in our lives is ultimately out of our control, despite how good we may be at pretending otherwise. Often, humor is what keeps a person going in whatever darkness.
CG: Many of the poems are ontologically inclined, as well as situated in the material of the world, such as “The Forecast” and “The Double Dream of Spring,” and I observe that your language will gesture romantically or religiously, then undermine itself. Inflation and deflation, such as “Searching in vain the barbed undergrowth, / idly resolving to turn myself into / a mapmaker or a ventriloquist, poet or god, / O what a ball I had, spending the days.” (You also teach the Romantics and the New York School of Poets.) Do you feel it’s necessary to deflate hopeful, optimistic imagery in this horrible, postmodern world?
MD: I don’t think the world is horrible, and I think all of us getting to coexist as creatures together is ultimately joyous and beautiful, even though of course some creatures are predators of others and in general, to quote Philip Larkin, “Man hands on misery to man.” I do think death is horrible, in that it comes to everyone and ends everything and makes everything sort of meaningless. I think American capitalism is pretty horrible as well, at least in how it turns profiting off others into a primary objective and favors competition over collaboration and fellowship and kindness. Additionally, I mistrust sentimentality without counterpoint, praise without some measure of mitigating qualifier. I guess I tend to approach most things on the page with a certain degree of ambivalence. In life I am a rather emotional person, prone to dramatic excess and hyperbolic enthusiasm, so the ambivalence and wryness probably keep me in check.
Creature is very much a book of midlife, and of coming to terms with the practical realities of who one is and isn’t, with what one expected from life and the incongruity of what one actually experiences. My poem “East Liverpool, Ohio,” begins, “I have abandoned plans / I had to matter.” Mark Rothko once said, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” I think joy and despair and horror and glory are all intertwined, both in the book and outside it.
CG: You teach courses on Ekphrasis and on Surrealism and Dada. There are many poems in the book that are ekphrastic responses to art, including performance art: “Skull of a Unicorn” (Damian Hirst), “The Courtship” (Marian Abramović and Ulay), “Clouds” (Andy Warhol), “Garden of Earthly Delights” (Bosch), “Nothing” (Pope.L), “East Liverpool, Ohio” (On Kawara), “The Ordeal” (James Ensor), “The Empire of Light” (Magritte), and three poems about Giorgio de Chirico. I’d love to hear about how you write poems about art.
MD: Once I had a residency and I was struggling to generate new work. One day, in part to avoid my computer, I traveled for a weekend with some other writers and artists from the residency to a massive international exhibition of contemporary art. Overwhelmed by the sheer scope and audacity of much of what I was seeing, I gave myself the strict assignment to not walk past a single installation or sculpture or painting without writing at least a line or phrase down in my notebook. This could be an immediate response to the artwork, a tangential thought, an attempt to describe, a riff on the theme, a question I had about what I was seeing, a partial transcription of the curatorial note, or a list of the materials used by the artist. By the end of the weekend, I had pages and pages of decontextualized language derived from encounters with visual art. I was startled by the speed with which I was able to create coherent drafts of poems through juxtaposition and assemblage of these disparate art notes, and how full of stuff and joyous noise these poems felt, how surprising to me in their progressions, how physical and sensory. A few months later, back in Cleveland, I found myself similarly stuck, so I drove to the Cleveland Museum of Art and gave myself the same assignment, not passing anything until I wrote something down. This has developed into a regular intentional practice of generating many of my poems through unexpected encounters with collections of art objects. I assign something similar to Bennington College students: we take a field trip to MassMoCA, the astonishing and gargantuan contemporary art museum half an hour away, and are not allowed to pass a work of art without commenting on it in whatever fashion in our notebooks, and then we return home and see what texts can be created out of the notes we’ve gathered.
One side effect of this art practice is a rapid-fire self-education in modern and contemporary art. In college I took only one art history class, and it is my great regret that I hadn’t taken every opportunity to study art history then, because I am very interested now in creating out of words analogs of what modern and contemporary artists succeed in creating three-dimensionally, in making meaning in a way closer to the way a visual artist makes it. Frank O’Hara’s poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” comes to mind. Another side effect is that I am constantly thinking about individual artworks, and my thoughts about them seep in as I’m trying to write poems about things.
In terms of writing about art, I am interested in the possibility of writing out of the condition of the artwork, rather than about the literal narrative of one’s encounter with it, where the artwork is a persona through which I’m speaking, where the poem seeks to capture the ethos of the painting even when some of the concrete details stray.
CG: One of the poems I keep thinking about is “A Lake in Vermont.” First of all, I think it’s perfect in form and content, and it has that je ne sais quoi of great poems that make them float around in your mind for years. It makes me think that it’s a nature poem in the line of the Romantics, but inverted; the first line is, “A lake is a depression.” The verbs are entirely un-Shelley-like: coughs, splutters, choking. Even in the last line, “The mountains ring me,” the ring could be sublime and/or threatening. And the epiphanies one might have in the gorgeousness of a summer’s day at the lake in Vermont end up for the speaker flattened: “Each consecutive day // I know less what I’m after.” At the same time, I find this poem delightful and true! A poem of being a parent and middle-aged. Of the wisdom of knowing how little one knows. And, the climactic moment is thrilling and ambivalent: “I float longer and farther / as the lungs swell to their capacity // with unsustainable love / for each subarctic bluet damselfly, / every stray sweetflag / spreadwing dragonfly. I may // or may not reach enlightenment.” Michael! The alliteration, assonance, and meter of those lines! I am guessing that it may (or may not) be a poem thinking about Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar.” Please comment.
MD: I love that Stevens poem! And I occasionally teach it. Richard Howard would apparently tell his students that “Anecdote of the Jar” was Stevens’s ironic response to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Perhaps my title owes something to Stevens, though in this case I am the one being placed in the lake, as opposed to the other way around. And both poems talk about surroundings, and the state of being surrounded. Thank you for your generous reading of my poem. I wrote it in the summer of 2020, during the depression of the Covid pandemic. The first lines came to me when I was in Lake Shaftsbury, some miles up the road from Bennington, and then a few weeks later I was in the water again, this time at Emerald Lake near Dorset, with its gorgeous serene mats of lily pads, and a dragonfly buzzed my head.
CG: Hey, how do you edit and decide about where to break lines? The enjambment in this collection is one of its superpowers, as in the taut lines of “East Liverpool, Ohio.”
MD: A poem is created through a progression of choices, some more conscious than others. Any time I put a word on the page or break a line, I am making one choice over an infinite number of others, and every choice I make has a consequential effect on the poem as a whole.
In college I had the opportunity to do an independent study with Mark Strand, who had recently been Poet Laureate and happened to be my favorite poet at the time. I would meet him early in the morning once a week for an hour. I desperately longed to impress him with “good poems,” but I felt lost because I didn’t feel like I had an understanding of what a “good poem” was. And then I figured, while I may not know what a “good poem” is, I think I do know what a good line is, and if I just strive to write good lines, hopefully the poem will be at least as strong as the sum of its parts.
I think a good line is a discrete durational unit of language that contains within it a particular sonic music, meaning, and feeling. Ideally, it has enough resonance on its own to be quotable outside a poem’s context. Necessarily, the finished poem would be less complete, less powerful, in the individual line’s absence. Also, a line is the counterpoint to a sentence, what ultimately separates prose from verse. Something causes the author to pause either mid-sentence or at a sentence’s end and begin a new line. To me, that’s the most important decision I make when creating a poem, one that affects everything: the rhetorical emphasis, potential subtext, meaning, tension, music, humor, tone.
I began then to think of a poem essentially as an accumulation of lines, of a poem’s structure as the way it progresses from line to line, and of writing as largely the act of arranging the lines into an order that throws off sparks. In the poem “Acceptance Speech” by Dean Young, he quotes Artaud’s definition of poetry as “the grinding of a multiplicity / throwing off sparks.” For me that grinding together occurs by placing one line alongside another. The lines often exist in my head or in a notebook, untethered to any particular context, for days or years before they make their way into a poem.
I also think my sense of what a good line is, as well as my sense of enjambment, developed over time through immersive reading of specific poets, including Mark Strand, and also Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Michael Palmer, Heather McHugh, Lucille Clifton, Lucie Brock-Broido, Mark Levine, Dean Young, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Cate Marvin, Rick Barot, Jericho Brown. And through extensive phone conversations with Jericho, who’s often my first reader.
CG: We’ve talked about your influences. Do you have any anxiety of influence?
MD: In general, I have plenty of anxiety. And I tend to second-guess the decisions I make, aesthetically and otherwise. But I don’t think I believe in anxiety of influence, perhaps because I’m more interested in the finished poem than in the individual talent.
I once took a class with Dean Young, in which he asserted that all poems comprised one continuous dialogue between people since the beginning of poetry. To contribute to the dialogue, it was essential to know what has been said already and how, and to add something new to it that hasn’t been said in the way you’re saying it. I also once took a workshop with Rodney Jones, where he casually wondered aloud while discussing someone’s work, “What is a poem, other than a conversation, across space and time, between the interiority of one person and the interiority of another?” This definition took my breath away. My anxiety as a writer revolves around how my poem adds to whatever dialogue and whether my poem has the power to communicate from my interiority to yours across space and time.
