Interview with Danusha Laméris
Q: Let’s start with the idea of music in your work. Your poems often call on music as metaphor and image, but also absence of music and what transcends music (“the song inside the song”). Would you talk a little about how music is important to you and why it plays such a pivotal role in your writing?
A: Well, I grew up with Ella and Billy, with Miles and Nina. Not to mention the Bee Gees, The Beatles, Donna Summer and Dolly Parton. The whole jumble of it. Plus, a father, and stepfather who were always listening to classical music. We all have a soundtrack. Now, where I live, there are the sounds of the coyotes at night, the owls. I wrote a poem that begins with the epigraph, “When pay attention to nature’s music, we find that everything on the earth contributes to its harmony,” (Hazrat Inayat Khan). I don’t know if this is true, but I like to think this is why we write poems; to try and find out how everything is connected. Music is a good metaphor for that.
Q: Has the idea of music (or of poetry for that matter) changed for you during the pandemic and the at-times overwhelming events of the past year?
A: Well, this year we’ve had the pandemic. Then, my mother died of cancer and I cleared out her house and sold it. All in all, it has been one long meditation on mortality. And that is the breeding ground of poetry. Long live Eros and Thanatos! Our main muses. So maybe I lean down a bit more, listen to Orpheus play his lyre.
Q: Another thing that stands out to me in Bonfire Opera is your ability to pull laughter out of darkness. “Dressing for the Burial” and “The Cat” are perfect examples of tragic poems that easily could mire themselves in bleakness, but instead choose humor in a way that lets the reader laugh with you. What role do you see for humor in poetry and for dealing with grief in general?
A: Sometimes I don’t know the difference; the two things become conflated in my mind. So many of the worst moments have this halo of humor around them. I apprenticed with the nurses of the ICU. Once I let on that I could go to the dark side, they let me into that clique—my son hooked up, unconscious, as would happen after a big seizure—and led me down the back alleys of unthinkable humor with those who live every day at death’s edge. I believe it all lives in one place. Joy is when what we want matches what is, grief is when there’s vast rift between the two. Humor is the bridge.
Q: In the poems included in this issue, there are things left over and things left undone. They provide a solemn counterbalance to the humor that also waits within. What do these remainders signify to you, and do you believe we live in a world with far too many?
A: Innocence believes in perfect forms. In a life that travels along the rails. It believes in completion, in ending on the tonic note, and not just in song. We can be innocent at any stage of life. But once we lose our innocence, we must struggle to regain it. But the second round is different from the first. I see myself as someone who lost my innocence early. Who faced the death of a child, my brother’s suicide, a difficult childhood. Now I put my faith in what is unfinished. Off-center. A kind of psycho-spiritual expression of Wabi-Sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of admiring that which is worn-in, imperfect, altered by time. If we can praise what is flawed and tattered and half-done, we can praise so many things.
Q: Finally, I like to ask successful writers about their writing-related doubts, fears, anxieties, Imposter Syndrome, and the like, as a way to connect with younger poets going through the same things. Do you experience any of these, and how have they changed as you’ve moved along in your career?
A: Well, I think in the beginning there can be a tremendous sense of confidence. The kind you feel before embarking on a long-awaited trip. And later, you come to see how much more is possible on the page, and how incapable you are of doing what you would like to be able to do. It can be very disillusioning. I had a dog that was so good at catching a Frisbee that, while she was at it, she could do a flip in the air, then land right on her feet. When my friend’s older dog—his name was Roy— saw this, he just watched her and cried, moving his jaw as if he were catching the Frisbee, when really he was just standing on the porch. That gesture sums up an entire state of being so well that I have it bookmarked in my mind. When I am feeling like I just can’t catch the Frisbee, I remember to think of myself, first and foremost, as a reader. I love to read, and I love to read poetry. To do this every day. And the reading is usually the gateway to writing, and the writing feels so good once I’m in the groove. It shows me so much about the world and everyone in it, including myself. That’s the real magic. What happens on the page.
Five Poems
by Danusha Laméris
Corpse Pose
Lying on the floor, I think of a woman I know
whose ailing father came to her house to die,
but kept on living. He’d putter around the house,
fix the refrigerator, tinker with the water heater,
patch the peeling plaster in the kitchen.
And though he suffered—was in pain—there always
seemed to be something else to do. Dad, she said,
after months of hearing him complain,
why don’t you try lying down? Which did the trick.
He took to bed and soon he was gone.
I’d always imagined the end a symphony—
a crescendo, the conductor’s arms raised
in that elegant, final pause. But now I see
how little gets resolved. The ceiling leaks,
the novel sits in a drawer, unfinished. And desire,
that constant companion, keeps tossing us
another bone. Like when a woman
told my friend, who was on his deathbed,
that she’d always had a crush on him.
Me, too, he said, (and after a pause),
funny we should mention it now.
Remnants
Always something left: The last crust of bread, cut hem
of the wedding gown, its dirtied lace, balls of beetroot yarn
still pinned with long, wooden needles. Orange rinds,
half the cake, uneaten tips of artichoke, red wine
at the bottom of the glass, gristle at the edge of the plate.
No use for the tulip bulbs you left in the bag, cucumber seeds,
spilling from their envelope, onions sprouting in the dark.
Baby teeth, tucked into a pillow, eggs caught in the ovaries.
Ticket stubs, postcards, maps folded in on themselves
in the quiet gloom of the glove compartment. There’s
dredge at the bottom of the oilcan, an open quart of paint,
bronze filings, ceramic tile, photographs of the house
you both lived in, its overgrown hedge and faded lawn.
Prescription pills, pennies, wax left after the candle
has burned, shells no longer inhabited by mollusks,
bones, whole skeletons strung together like beads.
Horse Heart
I keep going back in my mind,
down the path lined with ice plant
and coltsfoot still in bloom. Down
to the wet shore.
Me and Samy— the months before
we knew he was dying. How
we walked the foggy beach and when
he looked away, in one quick
movement, I took off my dress,
so when he turned and saw me,
I was naked against the shore,
holding the dress above my head
like a flag.
And then, when we did know,
the two of us on that same stretch
of sand, pressed against
the crumbling edge of the continent.
Nothing left to salvage now, except
maybe the curve of his shoulder
under my palm. The ring of rust
around the green disk of his iris.
A few chestnut horses haunt
the hillside, tails twitching
in the morning haze, their hoofs
chafing the sad, abundant earth.
Clydesdales
Walking downtown in December
I think I hear tap dancers,
picture girls trussed up in fishnets
and frill, jazzing the sidewalk
with their slick shoes. But
when I look up, see
instead, a pair of horses
pulling a white carriage
down the avenue
their great, tufted hooves
clipping the dark
rain-soaked street, I stop,
admire them as they pass:
blond manes and thick flanks,
accompanied by the warm,
earthen odor of manure—
a mix of stimuli that
sends my senses keening
for a world I never even knew—
rustling petticoats, damp hay,
the squeak of iron. As if
such things were locked
in our genes, some code
for carriage, horse,
that clappered
gait. Or as if there were
a horse-shaped pit
in the soul, a gap
we live with, though
it leaves us
wanting. Like so many
other things we
don’t even know
we miss: the night sky
before we dimmed the stars,
sitting under them,
around a fire. And
the something else
we cannot name—
though we used to
cry for it, wordless,
inconsolable,
in our mother’s arms.
Eros
Always rising from the sea: oysters, Aphrodite
urchins, sea snails with their spiral shells,
scallops, sting rays, sperm cells in their briny broth.
Hunger, another word for want. Aren’t we all
hungry for the fruits de mer—salt and squid,
slippery body of the octopus, the eel, body
of the lover, laid out on the bed. Molluscan
movement of the sex, sea-soaked, steeped in kelp.
Isn’t this the music we were made of? This merging,
the way back to that. To where we came from,
primordial slip of self, carried north, carried south.
on ripple and pulse, speck dissolving into swell,
body taking us back to no body, a body-less hum,
all water and wave, a choir without song.
DANUSHA LAMÉRIS's first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She is the 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her second book is Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series). She teaches poetry independently, and was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.
Danusha Lameris
Danusha Lameris