
A Brief Interview With Linda Dove
Los Angeles poet Linda Dove has just published her first collection, the award-winning In Defense of Objects. In this very short interview, she shares with us some of her process, and tantalizes with details about her next project.
LJ: Why objects? What is so special about them?
LD: Usually, when someone asks me about how a particular thing arrived in one of my poems, I have a substantive answer–the concrete images I include there are drawn from life, something I actually saw that perhaps triggered an idea I wanted (or needed) to pursue in verse. But I did not set out to write a book specifically about objects.
In fact, the title In Defense of Objects arose out of a much more pragmatic concern: in the fall of 2008, I was re-imagining my manuscript for the umpteenth time in anticipation of sending it to yet another round of first-book contests. I had been submitting it–in radically different incarnations, with various titles–for almost seven years at that point, rearranging poems, dividing the internal sections differently, dropping out weaker poems as stronger ones arrived on the scene. Basically, I was trying to find an arc and an order and a narrative that worked. And I understood from reading dozens of books that were getting published during these years that the poetry world liked collections with a tight vision, a focused vision. So I sat there trying to figure out how I could work backwards into cohesion–because when you have a collection that spans a decade’s worth of writing, it’s not only hard to identify a sustaining trope, but–if you’re taking your process as a poet seriously–it’s likewise hard to offer a single formal vision. In the course of 10 years, I was trying out a variety of formal choices–from confessional, first-person lyrics to narratives to sonnets to much more experimental, language-driven stuff. Over the years, I didn’t want my process to grow stale; I wanted to challenge myself and learn new things. So I was constantly pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t (I was not all that successful trying my hand at oulipo and flarf, for instance). That variability has not gone unnoticed; as one of my blurbers put it to me, it’s a “rangy” collection.
All of this is to say that I needed to find a way to stake a pretty big tent. I hit on the idea of objects, thinking that if I could suggest a rather philosophical, even theoretical, approach to such a preoccupation, then it might not sound too abstract or general. (I mean, don’t objects appear in almost any poem, always?) And I ended up writing (or significantly revising) about 20 new poems as “glue” poems, to attempt to stick the collection together along these new lines. I wrote them feverishly in the space of about a month, sent the collection away, and it finally won a contest a month later that included eventual publication.
The short answer to the question about what makes objects so special is another question: don’t you wonder what would happen if objects could talk? I do wonder. And I find that they do talk.
LJ: Tell us about your next project—it’s very L.A.-centric, is it not?
LD: I have a chapbook I’m working on, tentatively titled Eve in L.A. It re-imagines the Eve of Paradise Lost as a modern–and rather angsty, of course–woman, living in Los Angeles. I live in L.A. County, so I’ve enjoyed positioning such an over-determined character in a jarring context and watching to see what happens. The poem I have in the current issue of Los Angeles Review is drawn from that project. I’m also just beginning to imagine a group of poems based on the experience of serving on a jury for a criminal trial in L.A. The eventual second book will probably be called Subject to Search, with a nod towards moving on from objects to subjects.
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Linda’s poem “Dream Job” can be found in the current issue (Fall 2009) of Los Angeles Review. In Defense of Objects is available here.
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