TF: What three or four feminist poets have been most enabling to you as a poet?
DD:The most important feminist poet to me has been Sharon Olds. I remember reading her early on and thinking I can write about anything. Absolutely anything. I have not dealt with many of the same issues as she has in her poems--for instance, incest--but there is a frankness in her voice, a bluntness in her approach to her subject matter that is extremely freeing to me. Reading Sharon Olds, I realize: wait, I can just say it. And that has become the most natural way for me to work. Of course, it's harder in many ways. Previously, I was drawn to big symbols to mask my real feelings. But now that I just sit down and write what I have to say, with less and less self-censoring as the time goes on, I like writing a lot more.
Another influence has been Molly Peacock. I wrote "Whole," the first poem in my book Girl Soldier, the morning after hearing her read at Bucknell University. She said to introduce her poems pretty much what she said in her contributor's comment in The Best American Poetry 1995; women now have the chance to write "about a subject that has existed in it's richness since the beginning of the species but until now has been found little in literature: female sexuality." Then she read her poem, "The Rule," a taboo poem in that its subject matter is a dream where a mother instructs her daughter to masturbate.
My favorite poem of all time is Jayne Cortez's graphic and disturbing "Rape," in which she describes how two women kill their rapists, one with an ice pick, the other with a rifle. Remarkably, this poem came out in 1983, in her book, Coagulations: New and Selected Poems. This was long before a backlash among victims in America, long before the term "culture of victimization" was coined. And yet in her poems like "Rape" and "Stockpiling," Cortez is already fighting back. Another poet who sustains me is Ai, especially her first book Cruelty and especially the poem "Child Beater"--and again, mostly because of the content and the risk Ai took in writing from an abusive parent's point of view.
Of course I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, who seem to be of utmost importance of all people currently writing personal or confessional poetry. What I am drawn to in both Sexton and Plath is their darkness, the depths of darkness to which the speakers of their poems are willing to go.
TF:What makes it important to go to those depths? Does it have to do with a need to achieve a full understanding of the damage that patriarchy has inflicted on women?
DD:So many poets and writers credit their dreams as wo where they get the best ideas for their work. I think going to the depths is very similar to being in a trance, to living in one's own personal nightmares or fairy tales. Certain rules don't apply in such dream-scape: inhibitions loosen, language and syntax break down. Did you ever try to say something right as you fell asleep? Words aren't matching what you think you want to say, but a deeper strange language emerges.
I think it is probably even more important for women to go deep into their psyches, into their truer selves, because on a day to day basis they must wear a facade of politeness and false behaviors just to survive. A woman may be married to a man, or have sons, or have close male friends, and it's probable not practical or healthy for her to live her daily life with her defenses down or up (depending on her personality). What is really important about going into the depths, poetry wise, is that no one but yourself can stop you, no one can interrupt you, no one can tell you you're wrong. The depths are a place where you can try out ideas, carry them to ridiculous lengths if you want to, and emerge with poems.
Many poems that are based on great stories, even sensational stories, in the hands of the wrong poets can become belabored, didactic, or boring. But I think the urgency with which a poem is delivered--that nebulous something that says to a reader please this is important--is crucial.
TF:You have written (and published) a great deal of poetry in the nineties. Clearly, writer's block is not an issue: how do you account for your prolific output?
DD:I'm not sure that I'm actually as prolific as I appear. It took me six years to publish my first book, Smile!, which came out in 1993. Between 1987 and 1993, I just kept writing new poems. Although I wanted desperately to see my first book in print, I began putting together the second and third. By the time Smile! came out I'd nearly completed Girl Soldier (which wasn't published until 1996) and Kinky (which wasn't published until 1997). I send out work faithfully, which I think has to do with my working class background. I also treat writing with a lunch pail and hard hat sort of mentality. I show up to write--rather than waiting for inspiration. I don't think this is necessarily either bad or good. It's just the way I interact in the world.
TF:Do you revise much? And if so, what strategies of revision do you use?
DD:I sometimes have a short attention span with my poems. If I get frustrated and the poem isn't going anywhere, I'm much more likely to throw it away and start all over again. I don't hold onto poems that are giving me a headache more than a week or so. I don't save lines or images from discarded poems that often, although I know other poets do, and integrate them in later poems with success. Usually, because I tend to write long poems, my revision consists of cutting down poems and trimming them. Sometimes I find myself writing the same poem again--a poem that I'd thrown away months or years before and barely remember. Starting over is my most common method of revision, of re-visioning a poem.
TF: A lot of the feminist poems in Smile!--and, of course, your parodies of Barbie in Kinky--are not merely ironic; they're very funny. What role(s) does humor play in your work?
DD: For me, humor is a way to temper rage-in writing, as well as in life. Being funny is a way for me to deal with material that would otherwise be too painful. Some of my poems would be extremely maudlin or depressing or self-indulgent without humor.
TF:In the adaptation of Inuit tales in The Woman With Two Vaginas, I sometumes find the feminist critique of patriarchy typical of Smile! and Girl Soldier, while at other times I sense an inkling of representation of utopian feminist possibilities. Is that what you intended?
DD:In 1994 I was drawn to the Inuit tales while working on another project, a re-telling of European fairy tales (such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and so on). I was interested in fabricating these stories in a feminist way. During this time I came across Angela Carter's Fairy Tales From Around The World and first became acquainted with tales of Inuit cultures. Whereas India, the West Indies, The Soviet Union, and seemingly everywhere else produced "princess" and "witch" stories, variations of the stories I already knew, I was immediately drawn into the Innuit story of Sermerssuaq. She was physically huge and well-respected (a dichotomy that interests me right there) with a clitoris that could engorge and grow bigger than any penis. In another story (adapted in "Blubber Girl, Blubber Boy"), a woman brings back her true love from the dead by carving his likeness in blubber and essentially masturbating with it. I was immediately hooked: here were strong women characters, a dismissal of machismo as silly ("Him-Whose-Penis-Stretches-Down- To-His-Knees"), women outsmarting husbands who batter them ("The two women who found freedom").
I do think that the poems offer a critique of patriarchy as we know it, in this present time. Some rather horrible things still happen to women, especially women who are not the best mothers. In "The Starving Baby," it is the negligent mother's fault when her baby eats her, grows into a giant, and terrorizes the village. I'm not sure if that's fair to the mother, but I wrote a poem based on that story anyway. The gender roles of the characters seem pretty well-defined and traditional (as familiar to our own American culture) in that there aren't any women hunters or men who are the primary ones to care for their children. So perhaps I was not intersted in a utopia so much as a world in this book where the roles of men and women seemed more or less of equal value, a world that challenges assumptions we now make about men and women. A desirable women in Inuit folklore has fat hands and is able to tell a good story--a far cry from the Barbie ideal.
From the outset, my content was feminist; however, I was also very moved by the power of children in these tales. I have learned that the biggest "taboo" in the Inuit culture was the punishment of children, who were believed to be more intuitive that adults and more magical since they were closer to the "world of the dead," because they have more recently arrived from that world. So I am delighted when the orphan sings his magical song which causes snow to fill up the snow hut and drown his nagging grandparents ("The Magic Orphan") or when the neglected baby grows into a giant and terrorizes her village ("The One Who Suddenly Grew Big"). They are fantasy, of course, but I amazed by their sheer instructional value for parents. I can think of no European equivalent, a story where someone is punished for being a bad parent. Of course, in present day Inuit culture, there is just as much child-abuse as anywhere else.
TF:Tell me about your aims in writing the poem "Assumptions" in Smile! It's a fascinating poem, because you show how much people have in common, and if that's the case, then maybe there's a chance to overcome all the differences that divide us. Also, do the themes of collectivity in this poem connect with what you're striving for in other poems, for example, "Feminism" (Girl Soldier)?
DD:Yes. Every once in a while, I seem to write these broad, rather sweeping poems that are almost "patriotic," albeit a twist. I wrote "Feminism" after reading a Girl Scout handbook; I was amazed at how strangely militaristic and narrow the rules were, yet, at the same time, how people-positive these rules could be. I wanted to get as many assumptions as people make about eachother in "Assumptions," which is why the poem is so long. Some could be false ("That you have a phone and a pad to take messages," or "That you live under a roof") while others are probably true unless a scientific or religious miracle interferes ("that you will indeed pass away"). I was interested in the tension between the right assumptions and the wrong ones, and how we could better live with each other by questioning these assumptions. Both "Feminism" and "Assumptions" try to take a global rather than an American perspective, including (directly and indirectly) as many different kinds of people as possible. TF:In "Feminism" one might find the notion propounded by such theorists as Nancy Chodrow and Carol Gilligan that women (in this case, girls) are socially conditioned to embrace community while men are addicted to individuation. Some, of course, read these feminist theorists as indicating that the differece is rooted in biology--that is, nature. Where do you and your poetry stand on this issue?
DD:I always go back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's essay that says women will never get economic equality until most women give up raising their own children, handing them over to those who are really good at it and those child care workers get paid a lot. I think believing in either the nature or nurture theory completely puts us in a double bind. Of course, I'm very glad ther are feminine principles and energies alive in the world
In my most utopian view, people could be whoever they wanted to be and not be bashed for it. In The Woman With Two Vaginas, I write a lot about misfits: a man who thinks he's a woman, women who can't have children, a man who has a child, women who look like men, old women, displaced children and so on. It was very freeing to write about these characters who lived in a different time and culture who basically had the same problems as we do, when it came to strict gender stereotypes.
TF:Your work has always been responsive to multicultural concerns, and some of the most memorable poems in Kinky raise these issues in pointed ways. What is your sense of how dialogue among races, ethnicities, and cultures in your poetry has been evolving?
DD:In my next book, The Star Spangled Banner, I write about my relationship with my husband who is of a different race, culture, and class. I think the experience of being married to him-including the bliss and difficulties-has opened me more than I ever could have been, just reviewing situations from afar. In Smile!, I have a poem about the L.A. riots in terms of teaching an African-American student, and that was as close to the experiece as I could come, at the time. I'm sure if I had an African-American family member, that poem would have been a lot different.
TF:Do you have any words of counsel for a young feminist woman poet and a young feminist man poet?
DD:My advice would be this: stick to your vision, even if it's weird, unpopular, not published right away. Kinky went to 55 publishers before it was accepted, and now it's in its third printing. This is not to say you can't learn from others, take criticism, and revise, but trust when you think you've got a good thing going. And get a best poetry friend whose shoulder you can cry on when you get those 54 rejection letters in a row.
