Exceptionally Pliable

Sophia Le Fraga in conversation with Poet Ted Dodson

“You wake up in the dark, thinking about this beautiful book”

In celebration of editor and poet Ted Dodson’s new book, An Orange, he and poet Sophia Le Fraga recently scheduled time for a long Zoom call exploring how the book came to be, what tools language might borrow from the visual arts, and the various flavors of comedy in poetry.

Purchase An Orange here.

Sophia Le Fraga: One line really stood out to me – "I spend my mornings writing these loose poems about many ways to say the same thing" – and I wanted to maybe start there as an entry point, because I feel like that is a great way into your work. I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit, what that means to you, saying the same thing in different ways. 

Ted Dodson: Definitely. I'm happy you picked up on that, because I feel like that’s a pretty key line, a partial ars poetica. It’s referential to how I structured the composition of An Orange. I often repeat myself in a poem over and over until I feel like a poem is complete. When I was trying to figure out how to write a poem – something I feel I’m always doing – I gravitated toward this drawing technique where language can be made to dress an abstraction, tracing a shape recursively as a way of building a structure or object that the poem becomes.

SLF: I'm interested in what you mean by abstraction because for me, An Orange didn’t read as abstract necessarily, so I wonder where that fits in for you.

TD: The poems themselves seem very much on their surface to be fairly figurative, but there are a number of things that I wanted to abstract. One of those was the idea of a book. That's where the orange comes into play. The book itself is an orange, or at least trying to paint it as such, to adhere the language of An Orange to the idea of a book – the book being the abstracted idea. 

Or like in the very last poem of the book, “The Language the Sky Speaks,” I started from this poem I love by Pierre Reverdy and this image in it of a wave. The poem built out from there, adhering ideas and images and the details of my life to the motion of a wave, where language was always going out and then coming back in. That to me was the abstract image. The abstraction was the shape of the wave. You could say that the wave is an underpainting in this case.

SLF: That makes a lot of sense. I guess I was understanding abstract as something opposed to personal, because I feel like the poems read quite personal. The way that it reads, especially that first part of the book which is made up of all these untitled, dated poems, is like a journal. Are you transcribing straight from a journal? How did it come about? 

TD: Yeah, this book consumed my writing over the two years I was writing it.

SLF: Would you say you were writing toward a book that whole time? Or was it the case that you were journaling so much that you had a whole manuscript, and then were like, okay, this will become a book?

TD: I was writing these poems that were untitled and then I was just dating and using and attaching a place to it. I was writing those usually on my Notes app. I wasn’t really keeping a journal, because the poems were the journal at that time. That's just where everything was going. Instead of having all of these discrete categories where I would normally put things, in my journal or into art writing or into imagistic poems or something like that, it was all going into these long, layered poems, and at a certain point, making so much of what I was normally writing into the material of the poem... became the point.

My line has been that these poems have a democratizing influence on the materials that go into them. I’m paraphrasing this from Stacy Szymaszek, who blurbed the book, and she put it so well and understood what I was doing better than I did. I think that's true – that the poem does democratize whatever goes into it. Everything is seen through the lens of the poem.

But at the same time too, a journal has a personal use, right? Like, you don't show your journal to anybody else necessarily. So, same thing with art writing. Art writing also has a use. It's criticism. It's meant to formalize thoughts and ideas so we have a record of how the imagination responds to art, whether that’s the cultural imagination or the individual imagination or how art imagines itself. But when you take art writing and put it into a poem, its use entirely changes, and it becomes used by the poem.

SLF: That was a really big theme – An Orange seemed to me like a conversation, like gathering moments of conversations with different pieces. Conversations through time with different poets and artists and mediums. But I was struck by this impulse you had to date and put a place to everything. I don't know. It very much gave me like, poet-as-traveler vibes. And that was especially interesting to read in the context of not having left my house in practically a year. Doubly so, for me to know that this poem way predates the pandemic, so it's not a, "here's my passport stamps of the past" sort of book written in retrospect.

TD: No, none of these poems were written with the pandemic in mind whatsoever. Everything that was written in this book predated anything that's going on now.

SLF: Okay. That was the feeling I got from the first half. But the second part of the book, the long poem, “The Language the Sky Speaks,” was like watching the movie of an entire year pass by, with the waves going in and out. And I definitely found it very, more so than the first poem, painterly. We keep coming back to painting…

Can you tell me a little bit more about how that poem came to be? What I'm first struck by is my surprise that it predates the pandemic, or that I was able to craft a reading of it that felt so timely.

TD: I started writing that at the end of 2018. An Orange wasn’t the only book that I was working on in that period. I had other projects and things that I was also working on, sort of on the side. I do the same thing with books. I pick them up and put them down half-read. I'm looking at my bookshelf right now. I have Swann's Way with a bookmark three quarters of the way through it, which is a great book to pick up and put down again. It begins with falling asleep while reading. I always fall asleep while reading it. I would start reading it when I was going to bed, and that’s exactly what Proust wants you to do. To try to read it before you go to sleep so you repeat what is happening to the narrator: you wake up in the dark, thinking about this beautiful book. 

SLF: Ted! Your entire, like, Goodreads of this year should be just, "Swann's Way. Beginning to end, cover to cover. I did it."

TD: [Laughs] My Goodreads will probably be like, "Oh, Ted started these 50 books, and finished these other 50 books from last year." That's my reading life, essentially. But the same goes with writing, too. I pick up and put down projects almost constantly. I can't believe this book got finished.

I think this is what you're getting at with the dates and the places marking the first half of the book. At a certain point, it became an organizing conceit. It helps to provide structure and narrative. It was also a way to finish working on poems. My mind just won't allow me to do the things that I want it to do all the time, so I needed that scaffolding. 

But the last poem, that was started at the end of 2018, and 2018 was just hard. It was a crappy, hard year for me, just lots of personal tragedy. I remember I started writing this poem specifically in a notebook. It wasn't in my Notes app. I was writing in longhand in Heathrow. I was there, because I was on my way back from…

SLF: Ted, just globetrotting in Heathrow.

TD: At the time, my partner had a visiting position in Ireland, and I got to tag along, which was great.

SLF: You love to be a plus one.

TD: I do love to be a plus one! I absolutely love it. Make me a plus one for everything. You get all the food and fun and none of the obligations except to the person you’re with.

SLF: “I'll wait in line for your cocktails.”

TD: Happy to. I'll be a plus one in heaven, for sure. I won’t be the person who gets in. I'll be the plus one.

SLF: [Laughs]

TD: But yeah, I remember I started writing this poem because I always wanted to write about the translation of a poem by Pierre Reverdy that John Ashbery had written, and John had passed away about a year before. I knew I wanted to write a poem about Ashbery's influence on me and about Reverdy, too. But that became a very different poem over the course of a year. I picked it up and put it down, picked it up and put it down. 

I was compelled to finish it because it was so meaningful to me at first, so I had to figure out a way to allow myself to come back to it. I decided to focus on that initial image of the wave. The byproduct of the duration I was writing the poem, my process, and how I was tricking myself into coming back to it was that the poem grew away from what had first sparked it. It, as I said, changed. It all became more integrated into the whole that ended up becoming An Orange. 

While that seems diffuse, there’s still impetus in these poems – the emotional “how” they were written – that’s not totally disclosed. Like my interest in Sam Gilliam's work: that came from when at the end of 2018, I was at the hospital with my dad after he recovered from surgery, and in the downstairs of the building there was an installation by Sam Gilliam. Whenever I was in the waiting room, I was just walking around looking at those paintings. This work comes from a deeply felt place, even if I feel like the poems themselves don't necessarily reflect that all the time.

SLF: But they do though. Like, there's so much feeling. That's another thing that I wanted to say. I feel like there's so much, on the one hand like, raw emotion and on the other hand, this love and longing for love. And then on the third hand, humor. Like, the poems are hilarious. I would just be reading the book and find myself laughing. I was just surprised by that reaction. Is that something that was in your head at all?

TD: Was I trying to be funny?

SLF: Not that you were trying to be funny, but does humor inform your poems?

TD: I like to be silly.

SLF: I feel like that's so skilled that you can on the one hand do something hilarious, and on the other hand, your endings, man, are bangers. I underlined like eight times the ending to “[Brooklyn, 12/12/18],” "…A friend / tweets their mother has passed away and the mentions / trend, I see them all day, but don't reply." I was like, holy fuckin’ cow. Another moment like that was in the poem before interestingly, “[Brooklyn, 11/11/18].” "…A feasible utopia / could be born out of decisions and moments / like this? I'm seriously asking. I had a car / I sold for rent once. Sometimes I see it around." I was just like, damn, Ted.

TD: That is a true story.

SLF: But it’s just like the measure of it, the sounds of it, everything was so controlled in a way that I was like, okay, wow. Natasha was playing Switch, and I was just like lol'ing, and she was like, "What's so funny?" And I said, Ted is hilarious. I don't know when the last time I lol'd at a literal poem was. It could be that I'm just losing my mind though.

TD: Yeah, it could be both. That's fine. I mean, if you're going crazy and laughing at my poems and thinking it's my fault then that's a win for me in my book.

SLF: That segues into something I wanted to talk about, humor and painting, and more broadly your relationship to visual art. You started talking about this a little bit in terms of art criticism. Something that really came across in these poems is just how art literate you are, and how different paintings and the history of poetry informed your life and poems. Can you talk a little more about your relationship with other works and other artists across media? 

TD: There's a painterly idea of an art joke I'm especially interested in and that I find to be really funny. The paintings of Nicole Eisenman are so funny, and they’re serious too at the same time, multifarious in their emotional range. They’re big “C” Comedy for sure, but there’s also a slapstick quality to them, like a physical comedy.

SLF: Nicole has a great handle on humor.

TD: Absolutely, and that humor is managed in a register with sincerity in painting that is enviable. Or like GaHee Park’s paintings, which are psychosexually so involved but also have such a genuine delight and humor. I remember one of the earlier paintings of hers that I saw is this image of a woman kissing a cat’s haunches, and the cat’s asshole is just in her face looking like a piece of chewed gum. It’s gently transgressive, intimate and sincere, but also oddly sublime. In so many different ways, whether that's through grotesquery or sight gags and things like that, I am interested in more of a painterly humor than I am a poetic humor, insofar as I don't like puns.

SLF: Leave the puns to me.

TD: But you're actually really good at puns! I'm extremely bad. I could not sell a pun if my life depended on it. And there are other poets whose humor I aspire to. Corina Copp is an absolutely hilarious poet. She's so funny. Sometimes just because she's a great performer and through her delivery, but oftentimes with Corina, it’s these micro situations of absurd language. I think she accesses something similar to what I’m thinking about in GaHee’s work where there’s very little distance between absurdity and intimacy.

SLF: I mean, one line on the page I have open right now is, "…How fast am I going / and when will this be over?" I was like, oh, damn. That's so relatable. I mean, it's funny because of its microlanguage. It’s also funny because it's so highly relatable.

TD: The language of the book is pretty plain spoken. But I do take a lot of my cues, my poetry cues, from visual arts.

SLF: Talk more about that. Do you have a foundation in visual art?

TD: Not at all. I just enjoy it.

SLF: Because if you were like, "I'm van Gogh." I would believe you. I'd be like, oh, that makes perfect sense.

TD: Oh, yeah. “I moonlight as a painter.”

SLF: “I paint every day.”

TD: No. I have no background or any aptitude in a real way for painting or for visual art. I just enjoy thinking about it, about film too. I enjoy the theory and the experience, how the art viewing experience is different than the reading or listening experience. But where I specifically take influence from painting, especially contemporary painting, is in ideas of texture – and the ways in which poems can accommodate textures in the use of different registers of language, whether it's plain-spokenness or an imagistic language. Much like a canvas, the poem works well to hold differing textures within the same composition. A painting can be, in one part of it, very finely detailed, sharp and lucid, noticeable strokes and technique, and it has extraordinary legibility. But the exact opposite of that is also performable in the same work, where the painting can also transition so fluidly into the illegible and into abstraction. 

I've always been envious of painting's ability to utilize texture, and I try to translate that idea a little bit in my own work.

SLF: That's so cool. I just feel like your saying that helps my reading of An Orange. I feel like you translate that technique so successfully in all of the poems, but specifically in the last poem. It's impressive how you move from different registers to different styles. That's such a big task to be like, oh yeah, painting does so much. How do you do that in a poem?

TD: Yeah. I consider that often, how to translate techniques or characteristics from one medium to another. It’s an ongoing conversation I have between consumption and creation, how there can be an active principle between the two, a conduit of shared information.

SLF: Well, it's funny that you mentioned painting alongside film just because those seem so different to me in terms of craft, but I feel like “The Language the Sky Speaks” is a bridge there because that poem occurs to me as both a still image and also a moving image at the same time. That makes so much sense to me.

TD: All of these mediums, they're so much better at certain things than other media, right? But oftentimes they appropriate from each other. Film often can be painterly, taking on ideas of scenery and framing and things like that, all of these techniques that come from visual arts. Or how cinema has imported ideas of narrative and action from drama and writing. These are not things that…

SLF: That belong to the craft.

TD: Yes! Or the technology of it. Like, what film does that nothing else can is it manipulates time. This is a Maya Deren idea, but she was like, the camera exists to be a technology of time manipulation. That is the thing that it does that nothing else can do. And so, if there are any ideas of time spaced out through An Orange, that's because of an interest in film and, really, an interest in Maya Deren.

SLF: That features so heavily in “The Language the Sky Speaks.” It’s handy that you numbered your lines in that poem because I'm like, “Ah. Ah, yes. That’s what I’m looking for.”

TD: That was the designer's idea.

SLF: I love it. One, it gives me biblical vibes. Love. Two, it's so useful for looking for lines.

TD: It's definitely a flex. [Laughs] In these poems, I'm trying to find these points where poetry can transcend and exceed those appropriated techniques. I feel like what’s endemic to poetry is an idea of excess, how poetry can spill over the borders of art. It's exceptionally pliable. And it is a fantastic space for thinking about realities that are larger than the ones we live in, or possibly completely different than the ones we live in.

SLF: Yeah, totally. On top of all these techniques of visual art we're speaking about, I feel  there's also this whole role translation plays in your work. Because even thinking outside these poems, leaving this book, I’ve seen some of your current work in progress, “The Windows,” where the boundary between what is poetry and what is translation is all very blurred. Poetry can be translation, but it can also become more than translation in a way that you can't really explain. You just know it or see it.

TD: It's intuitive, for sure. I don't want to make any of this seem to be too overdetermined because, while I am thinking about this sort of stuff, the poems are mostly written through intuition. They're like 90% intuition and 10% craft.

SLF: Well, that's very chic to say, Ted.