Daniel Bourne’s books of poetry include The Household Gods (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995), Where No One Spoke the Language (CustomWords, 2006), and Talking Back to the Exterminator, Regal House, 2024). His poems have also appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Guernica, Conduit, Salmagundi, Crab Orchard Review, Rhino, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Field, Michigan Quarterly Review, Plume, Yale Review, and others. Founding editor of Artful Dodge, and translation editor of its online successor The Dodge. He also sometimes lived in Poland, including in 1985-87 on a Fulbright for the translation of younger Polish poets. A collection of his translations of Polish poet Bronisław Maj, The Extinction of the Holy City, has just been published in May 2024 by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, and his translations of Maj and other Polish writers have appeared in Field, Colorado Review, Partisan Review, Plume, Salmagundi, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Antigonish Review, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner.
You can read Power Strip, Artist's Colony, Johnson, Vermont in the July 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
The spark for Power Strip was an ekphrastic one, but my reading was not of a painting, but of the iconic design of a grounded electrical outlet in the wall, which indeed looks like two eyes and a mouth. (In the last year or so, a commercial on TV made this same connection, too, but I wrote the poem several years earlier.).
I’ve always been fascinated/tempted/guided by the ekphrastic. William Carlos Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow after all is not just an ekphrastic response to the eponymous wheelbarrow, but also an argument that a wheelbarrow is indeed a visual text worthy of interpretation that goes beyond description. Whether gazing at a Boccaccio or the back of a cereal box, this magical transformation between the seen and the interpreted is a marvelous thing.
Besides, I was surrounded by visual artists at the time. Thanks to my receiving a Poetry Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, I also was the recipient of a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I had my own writing studio with a window looking out on the Gihon River, whose bankside vegetation offered the closest views I have ever had of cedar waxwings in my life. (Yes, I’m a birder, too.)
But I must admit the rest of the poem is mystery. One image led to another and another. There are so many subterranean correspondences, and poetry is about spelunking. Usually your headlamp works.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
I’ve been partial to the narrative couplet for a long time. To me, it’s a way of cinematically channeling the flow of the poem, creating either a full image within a line (to be joined and complicated by the next line or stanza), or through enjambment to show how the mind can be disrupted or, contrarily, surge onward into the next line. In either case, the line becomes taut with narrative possibility, the images accentuated through both isolation and connection, delay or acceleration. It’s a dynamic mirroring the stop-and-start of consciousness that figures so powerfully in our lives and minds.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
Now that’s a very timely question. This summer my third collection of poetry is appearing, Talking Back to the Exterminator (Regal House Publishing), and the title poem of this collection combines so many threads of what I think my poetry is about. Environment, neurosis, and sheepishness. How can we live in this world while not disrupting everything else living here? In the poem, the pest control guy wants us to make a preemptive strike on the yellow jackets flying around outside, but my wife Margaret declares,
. . .This home
is large enough to contain others.
So why should we complain if the bees start to walk
across the scratched wax of the table,
through the sticky rooms of my bodies.
Of course, the sheepishness comes from the fact that despite a desire to embrace a pantheistic vision, to do no harm, outside of the poem I struggle to live up to this vision, to talk back to the competing vision of convenience and oblivious domination.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I’ve thought about this a lot, especially when I consider my colleagues here at The College of Wooster who do field research in biology or geology, connected physically as well as mentally to local land and culture—while they also think “globally,” which is what I think poets should do as well. I also know that as time has gone on, although by training and occupation a person of literature, I’ve become much more interested in the taxonomy of nature than that of literature. I’m much more interested in recognizing birds and plants than sorting out names and characteristics of genre. So, I do think about climbing into a wayback machine and starting over in science with the expectation that later in my life the poetry would still show up, but with another name.
How do you revise your work?
The first thing I ever wrote seriously were song lyrics. In high school and into college, I played guitar, and tried mightily to learn the piano. With the guitar I just plunged in, learning from other guitarists. But with the piano it was different. To learn each piece for me was a matter of starting at the beginning and working through the awkward interplay between the score and your fingers until everything flowed smoothly. This is what I do with revision. I keep sweeping through and through the poem again and again, until the voice seems to be “in tune,” intent and intense, and even perhaps surprised at its own ferocity or sheepishness or some combination thereof.
I’ve also been writing long enough to remember revising before the laptop and its amazing ability to instantly erase and replace. In those days, I’d have to use whiteout and then wait a minute or so for the whiteout to dry before I could type in the new words. Often my page would sport these chalky mountains ranges of accrued white out to the point that finally I’d have to abandon that page and type the whole poem over. Typing and typing the poem over and over, though, was a way of practicing its language, and often through this re-typing I would hear something better, and even the heretofore “finished” passages might end up getting honed even more. This process worked.
And, to a more polemic level. I believe that poems take time, that first thought is not necessarily best thought. God bless the beat poets and their instantaneous generosity of the soul, but at the same time something is to be said of continuing to work on a poem that captures your attention even long after the emotions or circumstances generating that poem have gone from your life. There is something there that demands attention, requires perseverance. Emotions are easy, and they shall pass. But what obsesses you years later, and makes you return again and again to this story, to explore it from all angles? To me, this is a sign of earned intensity, of true authenticity.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
I’ve always operated under the sway of Charles Baudelaire’s notion of correspondences. That this connects to that. That the world is in conversation with itself and we can overhear and even enter this interwoven world. And, of course, such a connective vision requires a connective language as well. Enter the metaphor. Rather than being ornamental, it is a way of argument through comparison. This is the way the world looks.
Often, I hear a line that makes me think of something else, or something happens in my current life that connects with a memory. (Indeed, isn’t memory a lot like extended metaphor or vice versa? There are so many interconnections amongst the differences.)
It’s all about triggers that put the poetic mind into motion. Once, while sitting in a faculty meeting, one of my colleagues in the back of the room, an anthropologist, stood up and declared, “All evidence is anecdotal!” A great line, and one that I remembered. In fact, it very soon after became the trigger, and the first line, for a poem called, “Rhetoric for Engineers,” which among other things referenced the story of an architect who designed a bridge in the European city of Breslau (now Wrocław), re-checked his figures the night before the bridge was to be opened, and to his horror realized that the bridge was not sound enough to handle traffic. Desolate, he left a note about his error and committed suicide. Afterwards, his engineer colleagues went through the figures themselves only to discover that the architect in his fervor on the night of his suicide had made his errors then and not before. The bridge was fine.
The thing is, I don’t know if I would have ever written that poem without first encountering that line, “All evidence is anecdotal,” which so ferociously interrogates the complexity of knowledge, and how we are all at the mercy of our sources, of what we think we know. There are many other examples of my overhearing something, reading something, or remembering something, then a poem cranking into gear.