NER poetry reader Carolyn Orosz talks with contributor Fay Dillof about excavation versus elegy, resisting the temptation of sentimentality, and her poem “We Used to Go Swimming Together” from issue 45.2.
Carolyn Orosz: The associative way this poem moves feels so fitting given that grief is such an associative experience. I’m really interested in the balance the poem strikes between sentimentality and truth. How do you approach writing about grief? How do you get at it honestly?
Fay Dillof: Thank you for saying the poem feels honest to you. The line between sentimentality and truth can feel like a fine one, and I often find myself returning to something Louise Glück said: “It is true there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.” I quite like the word candor because it’s a small c, not a capital c, word.
Grief is, of course, shattering and, I agree, it is itself an often powerful, troubling and sometimes oddly gorgeous associative process. The way we see or hear or think something and then are suddenly in the presence of our dead loved ones. Or rather, we are suddenly startled into remembering that yes, they are here with us.
Another reason “We Used to Go Swimming Together” is fragmented and moves through association is I am just not a linear thinker. And honestly, I’m just not sure I can be honest for more than a few lines. When writing about grief, which has been written about so often, it is particularly difficult to avoid writing in a certain pre-imagined direction. Overlaying that direction on something as particular and precious as my friends would have felt terrible to me, so as I wrote this poem I would just say one little something and then come to a full stop. Sometimes, as I waited for what to say next, I’d be tempted to write what I felt I ought to write, which is another way of saying I was tempted by sentimentality. But sentimentality is never satisfying and perhaps least so with grief. Grief haunts. It’s vast and unfinished. Which is the opposite of sentiment.
I think that most of us who write poetry are trying to find ways to speak about what can’t be said directly and, to this end, turn to image and metaphor. I wish I were better at both image and metaphor, but I have a tendency to think so much about—well, about the way we think. And so, for me, when I want to speak about something that can’t be said directly, I tend toward associate jumps of the mind and heart, hoping that something is captured in that leap—in the in-between white space of resonance.
I’m thinking now about how when writers speak about taking risks, we’re often referring more to subject than to subjectivity, but I think there is also a vulnerability to rendering visible our inner landscapes. Not too long ago I read Saskia Hamilton’s All Souls, and I found the way she allows us into her thoughts to be a profoundly intimate experience. Being authentic—which I think everyone longs to be—requires so much unlearning. Those of us who write are lucky because when we find ourselves bluffing, it’s an obvious physical sensation. At least that’s true for me. It’s there on the page, and we can reverse, revise, chase candor again.
CO: Throughout the poem there’s this focus on the physical body and the ways in which it can be made of use. Both to the person living or dying in it and also the ways in which a body can be of use to those living outside of it—through organ donation, pregnancy, pleasure, comfort, etc. Can you talk a little more about the presence of the body throughout the poem? What is the body’s relation to grief?
FD: This poem is about my friend Amanda. When she died and we learned she had donated her organs, I remembered when another friend of mine had a baby, and then, a few days later, held up for me a piece of umbilical cord and asked “Whose body is this, mine or his?” I think that in the presence of birth and death, we come to understand that these familiar bodies we live in are actually pretty miraculous and mysterious, and this might be one reason that the body is present in so many poems about grief. We write toward the unknown.
A more simple reason: Grief took me away from life. I wasn’t really here because I was also in the not-here. But my body—going swimming, for example—brought me back. We carry grief in our bodies. And we find relief from grief there too.
And, finally, being in the presence of someone’s no-longer-alive body is such a powerful and confusing and tender experience. How suddenly we’re confronted with how the body holds life. And/or how life isn’t held by it. I don’t know if in grief we come to no longer understand the body or to understand it more.
CO: What is the responsibility of the survivors, the responsibility of the ones who grieve? And if the one who grieves is a writer, does that responsibility change?
FD: The easy—and not untrue—answer is that our responsibility is to keep alive the memory of those who have lived, and to live our lives going forward in an honoring of who they were. And yet when I was writing this poem I wasn’t thinking about my responsibility as much as about—well, what I suppose could be the reverse of responsibility. Amanda was one of three friends who died within a few months of each other, and it wasn’t just me grieving; all three friends were (are) important parts of a community of friends. Each of us has our own connection with the people who passed, and sometimes I found myself asking Who am I to write about grieving this person? What am I claiming and what right do I have to do so? I could not not write about what was happening because writing is my way of processing, but my concerns about not wanting to exploit my friends were present and persistent, and, in a variety of ways, these concerns informed my writing. For example, “We Used to Go Swimming Together” is a poem about loss—the loss of a particular person—yet my intention was not to write about Amanda. It’s not that I didn’t want her to be present in the poem but I was less interested in elegy than excavation. I wanted to look at how grief brings up the unresolved, destabilizing what we thought we knew and broadening what we might.
CO: For me the poem is so full of dualities—death and the anticipation of new life, one grief recalling another grief, life’s endings and beginnings. The poem seems to move in and out of loss and whatever its opposite is—what is the opposite of loss anyway? Birth? Gain? (I have to admit I had to thesaurus that one!) But nevertheless—gain of what? Of understanding? Could you talk a little bit more about those dualities, how they play out in the poem or in life beyond the poem?
FD: Language requires thing-ness. Every word represents a single something. But, as all of us have experienced, so much in life contains its opposite. Grief, for example, and—rejoicing?
My experience of writing this poem was also dualistic in nature. I felt I was simultaneously releasing my friend who had died and welcoming her near. How can we not incorporate dualities in our writing when we live so within them?
That said, writing this poem I wasn’t perhaps as interested in dualities as much as in multiplicities, in using the resonance and discord created between sections as a means of making room for a multiplicity of understandings about friendship, the body, grief. I like it when an understanding leads to a revision of a previous understanding, and when that new understanding brings another understanding into question or, in reverse, into a deepening. I try to write into, and not away from, what is unresolved. It’s when things get messy that they get interesting.
CO: My next question is one that I am always curious about but especially because of the movement across time and place in the poem. Did the poem come all at once, braided together as it is? What was the process of constructing it like?
FD: Another writer once told me that when he writes a poem in sections he color codes each section according to the subject of the section, then he makes a graph of the poem to chart and arrange the movement of the poem. I would love to be that organized. That patient and thoughtful. But in most areas of my life I’m—well, I think the primary way I move through the world is in conversation—with others, or with myself—and so it was really such a relief to me when I realized it was possible to write a poem whose different sections were in conversation with each other.
So, the short answer to your question is yes, this poem came to me, more or less, as it is. I did do some editing and a little rearranging, playing with resonance, but mostly the poem emerged as it is. However, one thing that changed a lot in revision is how the poem appears on the page. When I first wrote the poem none (or very few) of the lines were left-justified. They flew all over the page. You ask about the movement across time and place and I think that when I was first drafting the poem I needed to make physical the way grief operates in two times (past/present), and the way it blurs boundaries (between life and death, for example, or between one person’s life and another’s) to be physically represented in the poem. The liminal space of grieving was such a strong element in my lived experience, I wanted its presence markedly there. Also, because when people die, there are so many ways they still feel with us, which confuses our sense of beginnings and endings, it felt right to let the beginning and endings of lines happen in a disorienting pattern. Eventually however I settled on the version with the lines left-justified. The more chaotic form asked the reader to do too much work and was taking away from the poem’s quieter internal sense of travel. You know how often, in revision, the first few lines of a poem end up getting cut? Using a lot of white space and having very few of the poem’s lines left-justified was unnecessary for the finished form but absolutely essential for my ability to write this poem.
CO: Is “We Used to Go Swimming Together” part of a larger project? How might it be in conversation with some of your other work?
FD: Yes, the poem is part of a manuscript called “What Used to Be Called Ruins.” The title of the manuscript refers to a sign I came across while my husband, daughter, and some friends and I were visiting Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (which, it turns out, is perhaps the best place to visit while grieving because the land—and it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t believe—is just so full of the presence of people who came before.) Anyway, at the entrance to the park there is a sign which explains that while the site used to be called ruins, now, because the land (and the ancestors who lived on it) are so tended to by the local Pueblo peoples, it no longer is. That really hit home for me and speaks to my hope for “We Used to Go Swimming Together” and other poems in the manuscript.
So, this poem is in conversation with other poems in the manuscript in terms of theme. Many of the poems explore loss, both the more defined loss of when we lose someone to death and the more gradual amorphous loss of when a loved one enters into illness. But that description makes the manuscript sound more bleak than it is. Yes, grief is painful, the way it burrows into us and takes up residence. But because it does just that—doesn’t go away—we have to find ways to live with it and acknowledge—and even, I think, to welcome it. Because grief is a door.
When I read a poem, I think that in some way I’m always looking for clues to how other people do this—live. This same sort of wondering hovers nearby when I write. And so—to continue for one more moment on this tangent about why my manuscript is not overly bleak—because my poetry speaks, I hope, with an eye toward self-awareness, it also often speaks—has to—with a bit of humor.
But if “We Used to Go Swimming Together” is in conversation with other poems around theme, it is equally also so in relation to form. Many of the poems in the manuscript are composed of fragments and move through association, variance, revision. If one reason we write is to create a space in which we can exist, I suppose that the landscape I need holds space for contradictory emotions, questioning, and intimacy of thought.
I am interested in writing that presses into inquiry from different angles. That may be the therapist (which I am by profession) in me, though if my poems could be described as inner dialogues, it’s also true that I am very much less interested in my personal life than its connection to a greater human experience.
I’m reminded now of something Marie Howe said about the work of George Herbert. She called his poems “gorgeous prayers of someone deeply in doubt.” Who doesn’t want their poetry to be that? For their life to be that?
Carolyn Orosz lives and writes in Vermont. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, the Journal, Nashville Review, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and MacDowell. She is currently a poetry reader for the New England Review.
Fay Dillof’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, New Ohio Review, Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Sewanee, Fay has been awarded the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry and the Dogwood Literary Prize. She lives with her husband and daughter in Northern California where she works as a psychotherapist.
Photo of Fay Dillof courtesy of Sofia Dillof