Dorothea Lasky, via Wikimedia Commons; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (left). Mother, Wave Books (right).
Across ten collections of poetry and prose, Dorothea Lasky has shown herself to be a writer of formidable range. One of her books is based on The Shining; another, about Sappho, is forthcoming. Memory, her most recent collection of nonfiction, includes essays about fashion, Satanism, David Hockney, roses, anger, and Bernadette Mayer. But this omnivorousness belies a unified sensibility, one drawn to the uncanny, outré, and polychromatic (emphasis on the latter).
While Lasky’s latest collection of poems, Mother, is just as colorful as those familiar with her work might expect, the dominant palette is darker than anything she’s previously published. The collection’s first poem, which The Paris Review published in 2023, begins with the line “The bird was blue and gray.” And the reader soon learns that the world of Mother is hewn from blues, grays, browns, and blacks. When brighter tones appear, they are jarring, horrifying, and maybe slightly evil. Red is “monstrous.” Pink is the color of “smoke / Emanating from my abdomen.” Oranges rot in the fruit bowl or on the plate, whereas orange itself portends imminent death.
As Lasky wrote in an essay published on the Daily last year, “color makes a mood that can wash over anything.” The moods that wash over Mother are anger, claustrophobia, and, above all, fear of and for one’s child (“The holy body writhing,” she writes in the first poem, “calling out your name”). Poetry’s consolations are fleeting and partial. As Mother’s finale surmises: “The poems are always / Taken from their mothers too soon.”
When we met on Columbia University’s campus in Montparnasse this summer, Paris was weathering its warmest June on record. The city’s lawns were scorched, and most of its flowers had wilted. Everyone, us included, remarked on how empty the streets had been and how impossible it was to write, speak, or think clearly. Once we’d sat down, she produced an array of refreshments—bright pink fruit-flavored water, carob-colored cola—for us to share.
INTERVIEWER
There are eight different poems in Mother that are also called “Mother.” How come?
DOROTHEA LASKY
There’s an irreverence to giving a poem its most obvious title. It just is what it is. There’s a kind of dull tone to it. I have another book coming out soon, called The Green Lake, and a lot of poems in there are called “The Green Lake” or “The Green Lake … and something else.” It’s almost like a joke I have with myself.
I personally think any title is preferable to “Untitled.” In fact, I’m sorry to say, when I see a poem titled “Untitled” it throws me into a rage. Of course, anyone can do what they want. I’m sure there are a million reasons why you might think it’s a good idea, but you’ve got to have a title!
What’s the difference between the “Mother” poems and the not-“Mother” poems?
LASKY
The answer might be boring, but I eventually found better titles to give those other poems. The ones that are called “Mother” are more focused on the mother herself rather than on what is surrounding her, but I don’t know if there’s a deeper meaning there.
I originally started writing the book in homage to Bernadette Mayer’s book The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters. It was written during her third pregnancy. When I was pregnant for the third time, I thought I would re-create the book, which is prose, by writing letters to my father. But as soon as I started writing them, they became poetry—which always happens! It’s so frustrating. You think, I’m finally going to do something of worth, and then it’s just a book of poems.
I wrote the poems in a certain order, and they ended up in the book in a different order. It would be interesting to look back at the original order to see when each poem was written and whether there were more or fewer “Mother” poems from month to month.
It’s interesting to hear that they were initially letters to your father. When I read it first, I kind of assumed they were addressed to your mother.
They became addressed to her, because she passed away while the book was still being edited. It was kind of in a different state beforehand. I don’t know how much of it is still addressed to him, but there are threads of him still in it.
Is the use of direct address a residue of those letters?
Yes, I wanted to keep the gesture of it. I love direct address generally and epistolary poems, in particular. There’s an immediacy and a voyeurism to reading a letter. The thrill of temporarily being the person it’s addressed to.
I was rereading some of your earlier collections with mothers on the brain, and details about your mother kept showing up unexpectedly. Like at the beginning of “Outside Chattanooga, Tennessee,” you write, “My mother used to put the fruit in jars / To last us all winter.” What draws you back to her, and toward the mother figure more generally?
I’ve always been in love with the idea of the mother. The mother as the line of power, excitement, of everything. My own mother was very brilliant and dynamic and had a very distinct personality. She was an artist and an art historian and so, so charming. But not every mother in my poems is her. In the poem from Awe that you quoted, I was borrowing some sentiments that a man with dementia had expressed to me. I remember a reader once said to me, “Oh, I know all about your mother. She used to can peaches.” I started laughing because my mother never canned a peach in her life.
One thing I’ve noticed is how often the speaker’s mother is a kind of moral barometer. The canned peaches evince a contrast with young people who “buy / A can of fruit at the store and do not / Grow their own food.” And there’s this part of “It’s a Lonely World,” where the speaker is talking about blowing a guy in a car and says, “I have done something so wrong that my mother can die from it.”
The terms mother and father have the same dominant energy as God or the Devil in a poem. You can’t ignore them. The mother is both a kind of moral barometer and a symbol for the inverse of that same morality. It’s patriarchy or misogyny that creates the image of the mother who has to be pure and completely moral. Complicating the term mother is a very important thing for me to play with in poems.
With this book, I was thinking about all the ways a mother can be portrayed. I probably won’t ever be able to shake the instinct to think about the mother. No, I’ll never be done with it. I’ll never get over my relationship with my own mother, because it was the most important relationship of my life.
My grandmother Dorothea, my mother’s mother, who I’m named after, died very young. Growing up, the image I had of her was that of a saint. As a child, I used to imagine her superimposed on the ceiling of my bedroom, glowing green, with open arms. I’ll probably never get over that lineage. It will always be an obsession of mine. The mother offers these different ways toward the divine.
The opening line of the first poem in the book is maybe deceptively simple—“The bird was blue and gray.” I know blue is an important color for you—in a previous book, Memory, you describe memory itself as a “bitter” or “muted” blue. Are we being let in on a memory here, or is something else going on?
In everyday life, I tend to like flamboyant things, loud things. I like neon, which I feel is a reaction to the lack of color in the place I grew up in, and because I’m a child of the eighties, which was a neon decade. If given an option, I’ll often go toward extreme saturation of hue.
There’s something otherworldly about that color, that muted blue. The liminal world is so beautiful, so muted, as if it doesn’t have to prove itself. The bird is giving away the fact that they’re neither here nor there. I also do associate blue with my own mother, because she was a very blue person.
This poem starts off in the first person, then it switches to the second person. At the moment of transition there are these three lines—“Inside something turned and wiggled / There’s a kind of transformation / That can happen on any day.” What kind of transformation is going on here?
I was thinking of birth, death, and metamorphosis all at once. In pregnancy, there’s this moment when the baby is big enough for you to feel it moving. It’s the most warm, wonderful feeling, but it’s also terrifying, like, Well, now this person has to come out. You realize that it can’t stay one way or another forever, and pregnancy becomes a tempestuous, ephemeral state of being. Death becomes that as well. There’s a kind of wiggling, a moment when things have gone beyond your control, as when butterflies emerge from their cocoons and you have to mourn the caterpillars.
You have to mourn the caterpillars?
Yes, I love caterpillars! I love bugs in general. In fact, when I was in high school, my job involved working in a lab with flies. Although that was a whole awful thing I didn’t love doing, so I won’t go into it.
Oh, please do.
Well, I was working in a neurobiology lab, and I had to extract the brains from flies under a microscope. I looked for particular flies, and then I studied how certain fly brains lit up. It was so beautiful, but also very mean to those flies, which I’m sorry about.
Which flies were you choosing, if you can recall?
They were all a pale translucent green, and if you saw a black dot on their abdomen, you had to take it immediately and dissect it. It’s hard to believe now that they let me do this in high school. I put the flies on a styrofoam platform under the microscope, and there was a tube of carbon dioxide to subdue them. It was horrific, but it taught me a lot. I think there’s something of these experiences in Mother.
One of the things that stuck out to me while reading Mother was how intent you are on writing about both animals and humans in a way that foregrounds the organic. Why is that important to you?
A poem is a corporeal thing. When you create in any art form there’s always going to be some element of the organic. And anything organic hits the limits of animality. A poem is full of meat. It can’t ever escape that, and I think that’s beautiful, though it’s also terrifying to be trapped in a meat sack. In forms of media that are less language-based, like sculpture or painting, there’s a physical reality to them—the canvas, the wood the canvas is stretched on, the paint itself—but people tend to forget the materiality of language or to think that language is above all that. I don’t think it is. To respect poems is to respect them as living, and more living than us. They’re a relic of the organic, always.
Both in Mother and in some of your previous work, there’s a kind of ambivalence toward science and medical institutions. There are poems in Mother that describe what the health-care system is like from a mother’s point of view.
There’s a comforting feeling in the idea of a system that has more knowledge than us, to think that we’re being driven or moved or taken care of by something else. But it can also cause intense paranoia, because it involves a group of people who have power over others. It seems silly to assume that there wouldn’t be at least some poison in the well. That’s definitely the case when we’re talking about the medical system. As soon as you become a patient, you’re this person they can do anything to and have complete control over. When you go to the hospital, you can’t leave unless they discharge you. To be a good patient means not questioning them, which is similar to how a lot of religious institutions operate.
I don’t believe that the spiritual world, which religious institutions claim to represent, actually functions like that. It’s more intricately organized and simultaneously more free. Like a lattice of a very deep bureaucracy that’s somehow also fluid. Horace has a poem where the souls return to their “happy seats” when they die, and I’ve always thought of his vision of the afterlife as an immense, infinite stadium. Having a seat, having a home in this grand system, makes you more free to go about things because you know where it is. Whereas here on Earth you’re always having to figure it out.
In so many of these poems in Mother, when the speaker seems to be addressing the medical institution, it sounds like they’re being punished. In “Roses,” the speaker says, “I will eat what they tell me to / Do what they tell me to.”
During pregnancy, these systems can control you because they feed on something you really care about. You think, I’ll do whatever you say so long as the baby is okay. You can completely destroy me. I feel like that’s how systems prey on people–by preying on the love they’re willing to do anything for.
Maybe this would be a good moment to talk about horror. You’ve written some books that are more explicitly horror-focused—including a whole collection inspired by The Shining—but this book also seems to be informed by a deep love for that genre.
At the same time as writing Mother, I was working on a horror novel called Katie, which will come out next year. I don’t want to say that Mother is a sketch of Katie the character, exactly, but some of the confessional poems subsequently informed a lot of what she goes through. Many of Mother’s themes apply to her, because she is a surrogate mother, and she’s completely manipulated by this horrible system, where there are actually demons and awful people ruining her.
Was writing the novel a very different process from writing poetry?
Yes! I loved it so much. But it was more painful. It was more of a life. When I was first writing Katie, I would get up each day, drink my caffeine, and write. It was intoxicatingly simple and perfect.
With poetry, I’ve never courted a muse or anything. Poetry for me has always been a mutable character, something that might show up, and who knows if it ever will. I’ve never got up, drank tea, and demanded that poetry show up for me. I’ve never expected too much from it at all. Poetry and I have sort of stayed around each other, in spite of me cursing at it constantly. But it’s a tempestuous lover and I’ve never been into that. It’s a beautiful idea, of course, but as a Midwesterner, that’s not what I’m looking for.
Prose showed me I could be devoted to it. Even if I was bad at it, it would have me and invite me in. Now I see the act of writing horror as something I can have each day.
I have one last question about this first “Mother” poem. I was reading the version in The Paris Review and comparing it to the version in the book and …
I changed it!
Right! So in the magazine it ends with “You will save it / Just like the others,” whereas in the book it becomes “But will you save it / Just like the others.” In the book, it’s a question.
The original version I wrote with a question. It was changed for The Paris Review, and I thought about keeping it as a permanent change. But to me the poem is more of a question than a statement. When the poem stands on its own, that definitiveness is good, but at the beginning of a book, it gives too much away. And, really, saving people and things is always more of a question. It’s not definitive. You could save someone once, but you can’t save them forever, because they are going to die.
You tend not to punctuate the end of lines. I don’t think you punctuate any in this whole collection, and here it kind of mutes the question. It’s still a question, but not a big, emphatic question.
I made a conscious choice early on in my writing not to punctuate much in my poems. I made this choice when I was working in an elementary school as an M.F.A. student. I was teaching W. S. Merwin’s The Vixen and there was a student in second grade who said, amazed, “He doesn’t use any punctuation!” Of course, that student had just learned about punctuation, so teachers were constantly telling them, “No, you forgot the period, you forgot the comma, that’s incorrect, you must punctuate.”
I was drawn to the irreverence of not punctuating. To put a period or a comma or a question mark at the end of a line is so dramatic, because the line break is already definitive enough. You have to really want to put it in. I love questions that aren’t dramatic, and I love the idea that everything could be a question. I mean, every line of every poem could be a question, when you really think about it.
Luke Dunne is a poet and critic. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The London Magazine, The Stinging Fly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Last / Next Article
Share