Bearing Witness: Rebecca Dunham on Docupoetics, Feminist Literature, and Obsessions

Rebecca Dunham is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book, Strike, was the 2018 New Issues Poetry & Prose Editor’s Choice. Her first book,The Miniature Room, won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her second book, The Flight Cage, was a Tupelo Press Open Reading Selection. Glass Armonica was awarded the 2013 Lindquist and Vennum Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions. In 2017, Cold Pastoral was also published by Milkweed. Dunham’s chapbook, Fascicle, is available from dancing girl press. Dunham has received national fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. In spring of 2015, she was the Arts and Letters Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University. Her poems have been published by journals such as AGNI, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, FIELD, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Antioch Review. She is Professor of English at UW-Milwaukee and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

On Friday, October 2, 2020, Rebecca Dunham joined The Interlochen Review editors Ella Harrigan, Regina Cassese, and Interlochen Creative Writing major Madelyn Dietz for a virtual conversation about her writing and research process. 

Ella Harrigan:  I know in an interview you spoke about being inspired by Muriel Rukeyser’s work of documentary poetry, The Book of the Dead. Can you expand on that a little bit, maybe tell us some specific ways her work influenced you? 

Rebecca Dunham: I read that when I was getting my Masters of Fine Arts degree. And it was just so different than anything I had read by women writers at that time. For American women writers, you know, Gertrude Stein is really different. But she never felt, Emily Dickinson never felt— in fact, none of the women writers from the early modernist period— felt super connected with the world. They didn’t take that sort of public stance which is often so particular to men. You have, for instance, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, all these other male writers who went, “I am the man and I am going to hold forth on being the hero of the nation.” Muriel Rukeyser, through her work The Book of the Dead, was the first woman I read that had that outward-facing stance, and it’s amazing. It opened my eyes to what you could do with lyric poetry, and how you could use tons of documents and source texts. I think Rukeyser is an amazing poet. 

I was lucky to take “Poetry of Witness” with Carolyn Forché during my MFA. One of the things that struck me was that to categorize something as a poem of witness, you have to have experienced it. For instance, in the case of The Book of the Dead, you would have to have been someone who had silicosis, or was in the mines. And that's kind of hard for a lot of us. But Rukeyser showed me a way you could take that kind of public stance even if you were depicting something you hadn’t gone through; you could go there. And through using documents, through acknowledging other people’s voices, you could bring that to people’s attention without having to pretend it was you who experienced it.  So I feel like there were a lot of things that poem did that I hadn't seen other people doing yet. It showed me the possibilities. 

Madelyn Dietz: Your books are wonderfully complex and often braid different perspectives, time periods, and voice, as well as cover huge topics. How much do you use pre-planning to structure your poems as you write, and how much do you write without any sort of skeleton?

Rebecca Dunham: Early on, I have very little that I would consider a plan. When I was looking at Mary Wollstonecraft, I was sort of obsessed with her. I had her assigned to me in a class years before and I came across the book when I was unpacking because I'd moved again at that point. It's  something like Rukeyser, where I know it was a long time ago, but it was just astonishing the work she did. So then, I just got really into Mary Wollstonecraft and was reading this biography. Naturally, I kept coming back to there for some of the ideas. I think I was just kind of obsessed with female artists at that time too. I saw this film about Camille Claudel and  cried, you know? I just was really drawn to that. 

As it went along, I started realizing once I sort of had an idea of the book: I had four persona poems by Mary Wollstonecraft, maybe I need one from her sister's point of view, maybe I need ones to fill that gap in. Those were actually the harder ones to write because it was almost an assignment that was content-based, I guess. And so I actually had written a lot of those and when I talked with my editor, he was like, “you know, you can take those out” I don’t think anyone would have noticed, but I didn't like them quite as much. So yeah, and then reading letters written during a short residency in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, that travel book. I really liked that because it's written to an imagined lover, yet at the same time, she was sent there by the person she was having an affair with so that he could sleep with someone else— I just liked all the emotional trauma in it. I thought, Oh, that's so cool to talk about traveling out in the world. But you're also going through this emotional journey.

MD: I'd love to hear more about how you sort of cultivate these obsessions.

Rebecca Dunham: Now I’m wondering, how do I do this? I think in part, having seen how obsessions work with other writers, I definitely feel like I can indulge in them. In grad school, when I was in a workshop, one of my friends, Nadine Meyer, was obsessed with writing about old images of the body, these wood cuts.  The woodcuts show anatomy, and so they show the body being pulled apart and pulled away. She just kept writing about them. Eventually her professor said, “I just don’t think any of these are working.” And she went, “Yeah, they aren’t that good. But that’s what I’m writing. That’s all I can write.” And eventually it turned into this amazing book, The Anatomy Theater. I’ve seen that again and again. Especially if people try and tell you what their idea is, sometimes it doesn’t sound that great. But I think if people are really obsessed or passionate about something, they should trust themselves and follow it.  

So that's how to take advantage of your obsessions once they’re there. And I don’t know exactly how they come to you. I guess, for example, I was teaching this Terrence Hayes book yesterday to my class. I was rereading one of his poems, and there’s something about Caligula in it. So I was looking him up to make sure I had the facts. All of a sudden, I was like, Oh, my God, click it. I let myself go down the rabbit hole, and then jot down facts that are interesting. Some of them I never come back to. I mean, I think I spent like a few hours one time researching marshmallows, because I heard that if you were vegan, you couldn't eat them. And so I wondered what the story was with marshmallows, that they had something animal in them. Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I’ll do and then just go with that. 

Regina Cassese: I want to follow that up with another process question:  when someone researches for a project, we find a lot of information, especially with backlinks and just collecting information as a whole. How do you fight the urge to cram it all into one project? Do you ever find that some of the information is unusable?

Rebecca Dunham: Oh, yeah and especially because you start getting into all the details and they're really cool to you, right? Like, how can you get all of that in? I would say when I'm writing, I tend to indulge myself in a lot of those poems. But then as time goes by, it takes a few years to write a book. So I'm often at a couple different stages in projects. That book just sat for a little over a year where I didn't even look at it. When I came back, I was like, “What is this? What is that?” You know, and then I wrote that essay of notes at the end. I felt like that kind of pulled it together because I'd started to notice that people were really interested in how I went about it and my thoughts about it— not just the poems. But I don't think I would have been aware of that at first. 

Since then, I've seen a lot of people who do documentary projects have at least short essays or notes that go with them. But you know, I thought it was going to be this multimedia thing. I had all these photos, and I tried doing all this stuff online with art and then with Adobe. I guess what I would say is, I just let the project keep evolving. I don't get overly tied down to the original thought. For example, sometimes you'll read books that are project books, and of course, documentary poems very easily flow into that idea of a project book. If it's only the project, especially if it's book length, it can start to feel not as alive. It's more two-dimensional. Which leaves you like, Okay, so now I've read all about the oil spill. But I try to weave a few different threads in. I was interested in myth, and then the oil spill, so I have poems that aren't about the oil spill and it’s just the process. It takes a long time to put a book together, and some of it's just your gut intuition—at some point, just being honest with yourself about which [threads of research] you think are really strong and which ones are less so. 

EH: I know you talked about the endnotes essay in the Glass Armonica— but I was curious about how much work you feel the author should do in terms of explaining their research, and how much work you feel the reader should do. 

Rebecca Dunham: That's a question that people have strong feelings about. I think I've changed my position somewhat. The easier it is to just Google something, the more I feel like, if I have a title, and then I have an epigraph or quote that directs people, then I’m not going to explain much. It’s not that I really think everybody’s going to look that up, but they can, and I also think the poem should work overall without the context of the research. I also go into my poems feeling like I need to explain everything in it. I go with the assumption that the person has seen or sort of knows what it is that I'm alluding to; I definitely don't want to waste lines explaining exactly what's in pieces I’m referencing. I know some people strongly believe the poem should have everything in it right there. But sometimes poems are complicated and the reader doesn't know everything. That can be fruitful. For instance, when I was reading Terrence Hayes’ poem and went into a rabbit hole about Caligula. The blank space in the poem ended up being so productive. So I don’t mind it in other writer’s work. I don't want to read a whole description of a painting, for instance, before I start to get into what the poet really cares about. 

RC: You teach a course on elegies. Could you speak a little bit about how writing the elegy is different in 2020? Do you think your own approach to writing an elegy has changed in your career?

Rebecca Dunham: I'm going to start with the elegy in a more theoretical way.  I think it has changed a lot. I mean, obviously it has [changed] from the Greeks and it's one of those old forms. It used to just have to do with the measure it was written in and nothing with content. Since then, we’ve had that association of consolation, consolation for public figures, as well as for things that are more intimate.

I got very interested in the pastoral elegy, which came around the time of industrialization. In the pastoral elegy, there’s this sort of nostalgia and sort of falseness to it. I think now, it's strange because it's hard not to feel like you can't be consoled— consolation can feel too easy. So I think there needs to be a little bit more openness to it. Openness, as in, it just can't be resolved and tied up with a neat bow where you can just move on. I think they talk about it as an anti-elegy sometimes. And especially with the natural world and the pastoral elegy, right, you have that idea of going out into the landscape. These shepherds encountered death, this gravestone, and it's just this scar on the land. I mean, it just seems so literal now, when you have stuff like the California [wildfires] going on. I would say that there's a lack of consolation— there's more irony in it. 

In terms of my own writing of the elegy, one of the things I like about the elegy is that there's not a set form or meter or rhyme. Just like with the ode, you can take the spirit of it and make of it what you want. With the elegy, I used to see it as something much more personal, more like coming to terms with the death of a loved one. I think now, that that's definitely part of it, but I've become more interested in [elegies] that have more to do with nation. I keep bringing up [Walt] Whitman, but you have something like, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” I am really interested in the pastoral elegy and nature and death. Part of the reason I teach an elegy class is because death is one of the themes that people write about the most anyway. So, the students can do a lot since it leaves the form open enough for them to find a way to write the poems that they need to be writing— instead of having it become overly prescriptive.

EH: I know you touched on how using a lot of constraints in your writing can actually really help your writing process, but to what extent do you worry about constraints in the first draft or do you find yourself perfecting them in subsequent drafts? Is there an approach that works best for you?

Rebecca Dunham: In the first drafts, I do use it more generatively. It's just a way of trying to shape my thoughts and sometimes that poem does need to find its form. When I'm really frustrated, sometimes I'll bring it back to a prose poem form so that I can start to figure out what to do with that chunk of language. Sometimes, you have a poem and you really like everything, but it's just not quite right because you haven't found the right line length and form. I spend a lot of time working on form as I revise. I try different things, see what works. I spend more time thinking about form and wanting there to be that sort of rigor in my final drafts. I do think it's because when writing about emotional issues, in Cold Pastoral, it was less of an issue. But when you're writing about intimate things, it's really easy for people to think you're being emo. Having that control is part of how it needs to be presented. 

I don't think it's fair that people do that with personal poems, but I think as a female writer, it's easy to dismiss things that are personal. It's taken a long time for people to even be okay with women writing about domestic spaces, because it used to not be a large enough scope. So, I think that’s part of it.

EH: I was wondering, are there any things that you felt that you couldn't write about as a woman? Or struggles you’ve had in the industry because of that?

Rebecca Dunham: I do think being a woman makes a big difference, unfortunately. If you've looked at VIDA and they do the counts— I don't know if they've done one in the last couple years. But men are more often the ones getting published, more often getting the most book reviews. Even when you start to feel like, “But I've seen a lot of women writers published lately,” and then you get that chart again. The women were the minority getting reviewed still. So I think that in publishing, it can be hard and I think all the more in terms of subject matter. I think that [for] women who seem emotional in their writing, it's harder. It's harder for women. I have some poems about motherhood in my first two books— those really bothered people. They would come up to me after readings, or write to me, “Are you ever going to let your children see this book?” And I didn't think that anything I was saying was that bad, because having children is wonderful, but it's exhausting. I don't know who would pretend it wasn't. But I guess women are supposed to be so nurturing and psyched to just be holding their infant, yet in all honesty—they cry a lot. It's really stressful. 

In the sequence I read on Wednesday, there's a line in it, where I said, “Now I'm supposed to tell you how I don't hate men.” Part of the reason that's in there, is after The Flight Cage and some of the other poems I’ve published, men felt like they had to make sure I didn't hate all men. And it's because anger can make people uncomfortable. I talked with Cate Marvin about it, and she does the VIDA stuff, and she was the one who said, “They do not want to see a bitter woman.” And so, in a way, I put that in the poem because I refuse to say, I don't hate men, because it feels like that should be something that I shouldn't have to say. 

Here’s something. It was years ago—I still remember. I submitted to Gulf Coast, which is a journal in Texas. It’s run by graduate students, and I was a student as well. So I was the same age as the person writing back to me. I had written something about going to the doctor— it was a poem about going to the doctor and these X-Rays and that sort of gaze on the body. He wrote me a huge letter back. A paper, basically, about how not all doctors were men. It fascinated me that it meant so much to him. People really don't usually take time to do that with slush pile submissions. It got under their skin. It’s funny that he thought he had the right to lecture me on the medical profession’s attitude towards women's bodies. He was so angry. But also, it’s nice, I suppose, that he was bothered enough to write. 

RC: I just want to say that when the BP oil spill occurred in 2010, we were seven years old. I was wondering what kind of legacy you hope Cold Pastoral will leave behind for people when they look back at environmental tragedy?

Rebecca Dunham: Yeah, I try not to think about legacy too much in terms of if I'm writing something about it— it makes me sort of paranoid. I have this idea that nobody knows who I am ever. And so I can just send poems out into the world— and nobody knows. I don't know. I mean, who knows? Some people obviously do know me. But with the oil spill, even by the time the book got taken, I was starting to feel like, that's old news now, right? Because it seemed like a long time had gone by, and then it was waiting in line to get published. Trump got elected in 2016, and the book was scheduled to come out in 2017. He was hiring oil people to run the EPA— all of a sudden, this book is actually saying something really necessary. Whereas when I had been working on it, a lot of what I was interested in, were the people and the time afterwards. I don't like how we forget people afterwards. I think that the book had more relevance than I could have known at that time. 

MD: How do you sustain energy over a long period of time writing and researching books, and how do you prevent burnout?

Rebecca Dunham: I do lose steam on a lot of projects. Many of them could probably turn into chapbooks, because I get about that much written before I lose interest. For a while, I felt that was going to be the case with the oil spill. It sat there for a year because I went, I don't want to write another poem about the oil spill. I'm going to go crazy if I have to write another one about the oil spill. It took me a while to figure out I could bring other topics into that same project. 

Glass Armonica was the book that took me the longest to get published. I just kept looking at it and being like, you know, I still really like this book. Then eventually it got published. That's the other thing. Sometimes you keep going back over a couple years to the same poems and they’re still appealing to you or you find something different in them than you did before, and that helps with burnout. The ability to find freshness in the same material, and come at it in different ways. You can also cannibalize off projects you no longer love. That’s what I did in the years after my master’s thesis. I’d go oh, maybe I can bring that poem in here and revise it or do this or take that image or idea. So it wasn’t wasted, even though it didn’t see the light of day in its original form. Which I’m glad for. It was very much a master’s thesis. The voice was so young.

EH: Do you feel like your voice has matured with the subject matter that you're interested in, going from personal to more general, or in another direction with what you're interested in?

Rebecca Dunham: Yeah, I do think it's changed. I mean, especially when I was writing in my twenties, I feel that I was much more interested in shocking people or having a pretty extreme voice. I don't think the subject matter that I’m drawn to has changed much and I think the image making and some of that is the same. At the time, I just wanted to have this really ironic, light voice. After I had my son, I got really depressed for a while— and so I was just home with him. When I started writing again, I had a very different sort of voice. I think it felt more honest to me. So those would be of course, the books that you've seen. 

I guess some of my insights from writing and getting older, like the most recent book Strike, I couldn't have written that ten years ago. I don't think I would have even understood some of the emotional complexities of it. I don't know how it would read to people who aren't my age either. I don't know, there's sometimes it feels like, “Oh, this is the approaching middle age book.” With every book, I try to have a goal that’s sort of different and with Strike, I wanted it to be sort of the most personal  in terms of the connection with the reader and much more direct— I don't think I would have had the courage to do that earlier, too. I think that was part of why I had this big voice in these images that were sort of impenetrable, because I think there was some anxiety there. In terms of, is what I'm thinking good enough or even worth it to say?

RC: Yeah, and what a universal experience in terms of anxious thinking. I was wondering, how did you battle with moral injury? In the medical field, moral injury is kind of like when your own personal morals get violated by a situation you have to confront. So I was wondering, while you were doing fieldwork in Louisiana, how did you battle with your more empathetic side in order to protect your own mental health while you were researching? 

Rebecca Dunham: That’s an interesting term. I did get kind of depressed at points when I was working on that book. When I was in Louisiana, less so, because I was so busy taking everything in. But at one point I was joking that the book was the “everything sucks book,” because every bit of research was bad news. It was all these things I tried to ignore and the minute I started looking at them, I just went Oh, my God. One way to try and help myself was by making a joke about the “everything sucks book,” and try to get distance from the tragedies in that way. I think writing is a way of getting distance from myself too. I like to see it all on the page, so I can move my thoughts around, see how everything is going to work. Then it becomes less of an indistinct emotion inside of me. 

EH: What are your thoughts on how to ethically use other people's words and testimonies within the realm of docupoetics? 

Rebecca Dunham: That is something I think I’ve become more aware of as I write. It's just a matter of becoming educated, I think, and becoming more aware of different perspectives— and how people would feel about that. I think you have to be really careful when you step into somebody's voice, even somebody deceased, and it is hard since I write persona poems. I never worried about stepping into Mary Wollstonecraft’s voice. I think I just identified so strongly with her that it just felt like that was fine. But there are poems that I've written and published that I probably wouldn't now even. There's at least one in Cold Pastoral that troubles me. Then, in The Flight Cage, there's one about Dorothy Wordsworth— it really bothered me. I liked the poem a lot and she's this white woman, right? So, there's no problem with me doing a persona poem in her voice. But the whole point is, I'm criticizing William Wordsworth for taking her words— and then I'm doing the same. I mean, I still like the poem. I don't think about it when I'm writing necessarily. That would just give me writer's block. But I wouldn't put that [poem] in now. Not because it's a bad poem, just because it's enacting what I was criticizing. The point was to tell people, he [William Wordsworth] did this, but you know, it'd be good not to do it myself. 

MD: I want to ask, in terms of activism, how do you see your work interacting with that field of social justice?

Rebecca Dunham: People always ask me this, and I really should have a good answer by now— but I don't. Activism still seems very different to me from the poems I'm writing, and I guess that's really wise. I feel like I should have an argument that says they're the same, and I do think that anytime you're raising awareness of something, it’s a form of activism. When it [the BP oil spill] happened, I don't even know if you really knew about it. You know, at one point, they were saying, “Oh, but who will remember the Armenian Genocide?” These things can be forgotten by really large populations. So I do feel like that's activism of a sort. But if I were truly trying to use my writing as a platform for activism, I would have to be doing nonfiction, personally, to be able to reach that wider audience. While I would love for poetry to have that audience, I have to be realistic that it doesn't always have that. When I'm doing things that are more activist-oriented, I do that on a lot of different fronts and that's more of my body being there to do things and help. But yeah, I guess it's just a matter of how much I really think poetry is getting out there. I mean, people see poems on social media. At one point poems used to be in the newspaper, which led to people encountering poetry a lot more often. But people don’t pick up a whole book of poems in America, unfortunately. 

RC: In your poem, “In Which She Considers the Water,” you talk about the Flint water crisis, which is an issue to this day. What was your experience with using diction to capture the locals' frustrations to communicate this same rage to people who may be unfamiliar with the crisis in Flint?

Rebecca Dunham: The diction— it's probably something I should have thought about more, but I did some research and obviously I was following that [story] because it was and is awful. So, I was really interested in using the diction and language that you would see in the newspapers and the scientific sort of levels. Just like with the oil spill book, I had the whole president's report on it and I went through that and I wanted to have that voice put against a more personal one so that you have these official explanations and these deep emotions. I was really nervous about that poem, because how can you do justice in one poem? You can't. I went back and forth with the thought of, is it worse to only have one or to do nothing? In the end, I just felt like I couldn't have a book with so much water in it without showing an awareness of that issue too. I was looking and editing the proofs when I was adding it in, and they were like, a new poem! I kind of have a mix of diction in general.

MD: Have you had to make some of those other judgment calls of when to add more or take away from a book of poetry?

Rebecca Dunham: Yeah, I mean with that book in particular I had this really long sequence in it about Monsanto and about genetically modified organisms. At the time I was writing it there was so much convincing evidence that GMOs themselves weren’t a problem. This huge group of doctors came out and signed a letter that was connected with the study saying, the process of doing that [using GMOs]  is not a problem in and of itself. That it's not dangerous on its own. And I just couldn’t believe that. I had read a bunch of stuff, and so I talked to some friends of mine who were doctors. I was like, do you think these doctors are right? We had some good conversations and they definitely convinced me that as we learn more, some of those ideas about GMOs were going to seem more like not believing in science, if you kept them there. I mean, I just can't believe it would be as bad as not believing in evolution. But you know, something along that line where you just have to say, ok, that's not true. So, I felt like I had to change that. I stripped almost all of that poem out— and I was obsessed with Monsanto for a while. So, I was kind of sad to see it go. That book was weird, because you get new information as it comes out. And there wasn't a lot of new information about the oil spill that was coming out at the time, because BP had put  a gag order on the scientists who agreed to work on it for a certain number of years. So at least that stuff didn't go out of date. 

EH: What are some of the considerations that go into your strategic mixing of contemporary and historical references and personal vs. scientific voice?

Rebecca Dunham: As I've gotten older, I really get interested in words. Some of them are different levels of diction in and of itself. So, I do pay a lot of attention to the word choices, when I'm excerpting things. If I read something that was really beautiful, or really short, but haunting, then I'll write it down. Usually on my computer, I even have a document if I'm doing a research project with quotes that I'd liked. I might pull one in if I feel like it would fit [in the piece] well. I think it's important to figure out how to have that voice be juxtaposed against something else. It creates a certain sort of energy, things that are either really technical, or just because the rest of the poems are like that. So it's what keeps your attention more. Some expressions are so well put that I wouldn’t change it and it could maybe start a whole poem for me. 

MD: What suggestions do you have for writing docupoetic work?

Rebecca Dunham: Okay, one of the things with research too, I have written a lot about images. I wish that I was a visual artist, in many ways, but sometimes when you allude to something that's a research- based issue, it can provide a bigger context. I found that really helpful when I was writing my first book, which was about motherhood. Because if I just wrote a poem about motherhood, it felt really narcissistic and like, I'm the first person to ever be a mother. But if you put it within the context of these larger narratives we have about mothers and about women, people will jump and fill in part of the gaps because you're appealing to a story that they already sort of know. It moves out of your own little world. Sometimes, I use the references more to get out of having to explain stuff. Because if you reference some well known religious painting, then everyone goes, oh, okay, so this is the story of x. And we know all of these associations with that separate story. Then, you can just get to the poem. Even if it's just about an individual life, people are making that connection. Anyway, it's the opposite of trying to explain it. The reference explains something for you.