Poetry’s Mysterious Power: A Conversation With Dara Barrois/Dixon

For this next installment in a series of interviews with contemporary poets, contributing editor Peter Mishler corresponded with Dara Barrois/Dixon. Barrois/Dixon, born in New Orleans, lives in western Massachusetts. Her writing has been supported by the Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations. Her new book, Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences for Astronauts, is out now from Conduit Books. 

Recent books and chapbooks include Thru and Three from Scram, Nine from Incessant Pipe, and Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina from Wave Books.

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Peter Mishler: What is the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?

Dara Barrois/Dixon: The strangest thing: Poetry’s enduring, mysterious powers, transformative actions, paradoxical heart. Here is this empty space, on a page, on a wall, on a screen, in a notebook, on a scrap, someone says a poem will go there, by magic, every word, every mark, every winding form of syntax, infinite sonic frequencies, each instance suddenly gathers around itself each and every previous encounter, suddenly everything that is put into the poem carries along with it every significance—good, bad, awful, wrong, right, dull, brazen, calling, answering, loving, hating, avenging, forgiving, seducing, inviting, damning, trusting, praising, saving, salvaging, presenting us with new information about ourselves and one another.

Poetry’s intelligence. Intelligence gathering. Its fearlessness. Its inclination to forgive, to keep secrets, to tell secrets, to make, by means of poetry’s illusions, chances for us to experience eternal connections, confluence, continuity. Because, no one, nothing has yet been able to break into another’s mind, to be privy to the exact range of another mind’s experiences, poetry has been our only consolation. By which I mean we’re not as alone as we think we are.

Maybe the strangest thing is how much we need it.

Even when someone says it is useless. It’s hard to hear a kind of delight in the tone of voice that goes along with saying poetry is useless. I may be useless, but poetry is certainly not. Maybe to say poetry is useless is a talisman. A way of protecting poetry by denying its value. I will see if I can try calling poetry useless in this way.

PM: Do you have a story, memory, or fleeting image from your youth that in some way presages that you would continue to write poetry, make art, as an adult person?

DB/D: It seems preposterous that there was never any other way for me to be. I wrote before I could write. I drew pictures of poems; traditional, conventional-looking poems—the ones you’d find in ancient collections intended to show you poetry’s history, at least one narrow version of it. Poems looked like poems, not like words in storybooks. I had not yet met a prose poem. I drew poems and I loved them. I trusted them.

I understood that for something to go into a poem changes that something radically. And radical change is always what I love and fear. I spent a lot of my childhood on the banks of the Mississippi River, close to where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. We called the riverbank “the batture.” I spent years, hours, days, alone there, watching the river go by, watching ships from around the planet come into sight as they appeared as if out of nowhere from around a bend on their way to dock at New Orleans.

PM: Would you be willing to talk a bit about your reading practices? It’s hard not to want to know about your habits and life as a reader when reading your poems.

DB/D: Friends have called me a promiscuous reader. And yes, I will read just about anything. My curiosity apparently is boundless. Whether this serves a purpose or not, I don’t know. I know my hunger to know has never been tempered. I know it’s a joy to read something that assures you your mind has been working after all. When I first read E.A. Poe as a young girl, my thought was, oh, good, I’ve always suspected reason could not be the be all and end all people often make of it.

You know, the sleep of reason produce monsters, and being told to be reasonable, and being told you cannot be reasoned with. Poe makes it clear that reasoning is a dangerous thing. When I read Flaubert, I felt, oh good, empathy is not as simple as it appears to be. Grace Paley and Joy Williams make it clear why paying attention to how we talk to one another makes all the difference. Hart Crane’s ambitions broke my heart. Wallace Stevens’s swerves between goofiness and languorous beauty, Emily Dickinson’s stark sharp brilliance and everyday practice.

Because I understood I would be making my living teaching, I felt obligated so as not to embarrass myself too much, to read deeply and widely and become, if not a scholar, a permanent student of reading books, old, new—there’s an endless supply. The first time a big American Literature lecture class was assigned to me, I taught writers from across the Americas. I learned a lot about the circulation of ideas.

PM: How do you see your poems that are directly informed by your reading?

DB/D: About reading—first of all, its magical aspect never goes away. Right there, right in front of you, sounds become letters, letters become words, words join one another to become inklings, thinking, radical transformations occur as your brain does its work—this very act has such intrinsic power.

Even when what I’m reading isn’t all that engaging, the act itself of reading never stops being something to revere, it’s inherently astonishing, miraculous. Then comes the dirty truth, sometimes what you’re reading can hurt you, sometimes it is intended to hurt you or confuse you or mesmerize you, it can lead you astray and even waste your time. I don’t like it when I hear writers talking about making or forcing someone do something, or talking about their strategies, as if it’s a war or a sport or a political campaign, as if winning and losing and using and manipulating is the joy of it—ugh, that’s when misleading and condescending and propaganda can come in.

PM: I think your “approach” to how your reading has become a part of your art is very unique.

DB/D: Thank you. I’m not sure how. In what way?

PM: I’m thinking or example of your notes and attributions, or your more recent book Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina.

DB/D: The poem called “Credits” in the Anna book begins to give credit where credit is due—to name writers whose ways accompanied and still accompany me as I stumble along hoping to write something worthwhile. I won’t be too surprised if I do a “Credits” sequel. Originally the poem was called “After” as in the way someone will write something and under its title might say “after so and so.” As I was watching the credits of a movie I’d just seen, I think it was Midnight Cowboy, it came to me that “Credits” would be a much better name for what I was doing. I like that credits includes thanks. Hearing someone say oh I took this from x or y or z—sounds a little bit off to me, took as in take, sounds as if it goes unattributed or who knows, maybe by force! Well, there is that other meaning of take, the one that goes oh, the baby, it really takes after their aunt so and so and so I wrote I took, I took, I took, until the repeating of it changed its meaning.

PM: I think that’s what I mean by unique. It never sounds “off” to me or “taken” when you’re working with what you’ve read. What were you thinking about—about poetry—as you began publishing your first poems, your first collection?

DB/D: I’d never made a book before, so I erred on the side of simplicity—3 parts, blood (family), hook (sex), eye (visions, metaphor, the next step, the longer view, the metaphysical). First books! How I love them. Ha, I wish every book could be a first book. I guess, maybe I’m always trying to replicate that first book feeling—knowing it’s absurd  to even think like that, and that’s why I approach every book as an opportunity to do something I’ve never done before.

A few poems in that first book, Blood, Hook, & Eye, I wrote when I was 19, 20, I kept writing and changing and learning, adding poems, taking out poems, until it was published seven years later. It was the runner-up for the Yale Prize for Younger Poets, and the judge, Stanley Kunitz kindly sent it to U. of Texas Press, which was starting a new poetry series, so they published it.

PM: What do you notice about yourself or your work then that you would still say is true now—that hasn’t changed?

DB/D: What hasn’t changed—I love what I do, I love that writing is there to be done, I love that I’ve been able to live my life finding work and circumstances by which and in which I’m able to write. I do not mean to suggest it’s been easy or simple. I’ve just been to the great poetry oasis Woodland Pattern, in Milwaukee, to do a reading and a workshop. The workshop’s focus was how to find time to do the writing you hope to do no matter the circumstances, situation, and so on. The poets and writers there make it clear how hard it is to find verifying circumstances and how good it is when they find a location that exists to champion poets.

PM: What do you think has been your biggest crisis, frustration, or anxiety surrounding poetry, from any time in your life?

DB/D: Two. One, back around the time I was making Voyages In English (named after my grade school English textbook), I had a feeling, a strong feeling, a conviction, I had to find new ways to end poems. Why? I don’t recall. I do recall as if it is today, I had to change how a poem ended—as if say, instead of going around a corner, it’d be more like going around a traffic circle, or maybe parking under a live oak or going into a tunnel under an industrial canal. It took me months to figure this out, meaning it had to happen on its own and I had to recognize it was what I was looking for.

Two. Bringing the book just out, Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences For Astronauts, back to life, after it’d lay dormant for going on a decade. I suffered some god-awful bouts of self-pity and self-doubt. This constituted a crisis. I had to realize I could not bring it back to life, I had to make it over again as a new book. Someone said to me oh, it’s your Frankenstein’s creature book.

PM: What did you doubt about this collection?

DB/D: I thought I knew the book, but it had changed because I had changed. And it wasn’t a matter of making small changes; the book had to be revived and reconstituted and remade altogether—it took a long time, months for me to realize this, once I realized it, I had to imagine what it would take to look at the old, original manuscript basically as what some people call raw material—which is a little creepy sounding.

PM: I am curious to know if you see any distinct difference between this book and your collections from Wave, knowing that your next collection will potentially be with Wave?

DB/D: I hope it will, I love Wave, and what it represents. I’m sending a new book to them in the next month or two. At least for now, each poem in the book I’m putting together now is a sonnet, followed by some white space followed by prose that either extends the poem, is about something else, adjacent or otherwise, goes on a riff related to the sonnet, introduces other ideas that may or may not be “about” the previous lines, may be juxtaposed to them, or may be circumstantial. I wrote this book between April 2020 and April 2023, and have been shaping it ever since.

PM: Could you talk about the sections of this book and their meaning for you?

DB/D: In Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences For Astronauts? Yes, apparently three parts, in this case, named parts: AFTER, BEFORE, & AFTER, my preferred number. Maybe really there are four parts. The end-matter, Acknowledgments, Epigraphs, and Attributions, Some Not Appearing in the Previous Pages, Notes, About the Author because of their uncustomary content. I guess this might amount to a fourth part.

PM: Was this an organizing principle that developed as you were gathering poems together?

DB/D: I was talking with a friend one night about difficulties I continued to have with the book; I heard myself saying before, after, after, before, before again, after some more which caused me to think of a category that’s often pretty blunt—before and after—as in pictures, the category shows a before that is one way and an after that is another way, leaving out the instigating something or other that is the cause of the radical change in appearance of the pictured person, or house or city street or river or horse or dish or anything. At first before and after started slipping into the rewriting I was doing, that evolved into naming sections, such as they are, in the book.

PM: I also wonder if there is a particular poem or series of poems that feel like they taught you the most about how to organize this new book?

DB/D: I wrote the longish poem “Are You Okay?” and thought it belonged between AFTER and &AFTER which then helped me scatter and gather on either side of the middle. Although I name big themes when I mention my first book’s shaping, that is the only time I’ve ever thought of thematically arranging poems in a book. Just as they say about stanzas being rooms, or a place to stay. In Louisiana, it’s common to hear someone say something along the lines of, oh, they stay with their cousins in Plaquemines parish, instead of “live with their cousins,” oh, or even better when stay is used to say something is a stay against indifference, or a stay against destruction, something that protects something from damage. I like that meaning. I think stay against confusion is one of the more common stays.

PM: How would you describe/define yourself as a rewriter or reviser?

DB/D: Both, depending—seems one is about considerations of something like, Is this word better than that word, is this repetition doing something good for it to be doing, do I want to leave this in or take that out, and the other is about seeing whole passages or maybe even the whole piece differently. I’m pretty sure both are at play at various times.

PM: But if you had to characterize yourself as a certain type of rewriter or reviser, how would you describe yourself?

DB/D: I think it’s fair to say my respect for poetry’s powerful reserves—words and music, and means by which we link these in poems, and poetry’s long history lead me to understand that anything that’s done in a poem can be undone—we choose what and how—we choose whether something is in a river or on a hillside, if it is a fish or a snake, we have a choice from among endless tones, we choose if we know where we are or are lost in a strange place, we have every opportunity to choose how things are in poems, as opposed to a certain number of limited choices we have in daily life. I do tend to believe every poem hopes to seem to be the inevitable manifestation of one way of experiencing something—at the same time I believe it’s not that we’re fooling ourselves, it’s that we’re imagining how lives can be  exponentially extended vertically, as well as horizontally. Every art includes in its spirit and at heart this potential.