Izzy Casey

David Trinidad: An Interview Under the Influence

David Trinidad’s latest book of poems is Swinging on a Star (Turtle Point Press, 2017). His other books include Notes on a Past Life (Blazevox [books], 2016), Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera (Turtle Point, 2013), Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems (Turtle Point, 2011), The Late Show (Turtle Point, 2007), and Plasticville (Turtle Point, 2000). His collaborations with other poets include Descent of the Dolls, Part I (with Jeffery Conway and Gillian Mccain, Blazevox, 2017), By Myself: An Autobiography (with D.A. Powell, Turtle Point, 2009), and Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse (with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie, Turtle Point, 2003). He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011) and Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith (Turtle Point, 2019). His Emily Dickinson divination deck, Divining Poets: Dickinson, appeared from Turtle Point in 2019. Trinidad lives in Chicago, where he is a professor of creative writing/poetry at Columbia College. I was introduced to David Trinidad’s poems in a graduate seminar on the long poem taught by the fabulous Robyn Schiff. My infatuation with pink, Barbie, the New York School of poetry, and poems about how painful childhood can be, is what initially pulled me toward David’s work. Obsessed with the obsessive nature of his writing, I read Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems (a total of 494 pages) from front to back in one sitting. Our email exchange lasted two full seasons. My questions to him were written exclusively in pink font. Bubblegum, to be exact. “Should I take a few pictures of the collections I mentioned,” he wrote to me, “Barbie, sixties makeup, or whatnot?” My inbox filled up with vintage Barbie outfits in their original packaging, pink- and orange-striped Yardley lipstick tubes from the 1960s, a doll-sized satin pink chaise longue with gold trimming to match, and a circular cane and glass-top table that once belonged to Sylvia Plath. The names of his image files would make perfect titles for poems— “Petite Princess,” “Solo in the Spotlight,” and “Silken Flame” to name a few. “Sorry, obsessed,” he wrote again. “I can take better shots of Sylvia’s table if you want.”

Izzy Casey: In your poem “Gloss of the Past,” I can’t help but hear the phrase “loss of the past.” I love the idea that the past is something we are actively losing. Phrases like “the poem has earned such and such” or “as a reader, I gained this and that,” get tossed around in poetry workshops.

Courtesy of David Trinidad

But I’ve never heard anyone discuss what a poem has lost. What are your poems losing?

David Trinidad: I love that you heard “loss of the past” in “Gloss of the Past.” That’s pretty much my major preoccupation. How to ward off that loss, to recapture what I’ve experienced, what I’ve witnessed, what I’ve felt. But it’s also an exploration, to test the limits of memory. To see what can be uncovered, learned. If the past is a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley said, I want to see what can be discovered there. And Proust, too: the search for lost time. I always feel like I’ve conquered time, to some degree, if I can capture what’s past, what’s lost, in a poem. As to what’s lost when a poem is completed, well, I guess it’s the hope that anything, no matter how much life you give it in a poem, can ever be recaptured.

IC: I must know the story behind your poem “From Ted Hughes’ List of Suggested Writing Exercises for Sylvia Plath.” Is it made up of a found text? What is it? And Plath’s table? How do you get your hands on all these Plath artifacts? Do competitors get in your way? Does collecting her belongings inform you about her writing (or yours) in a way you hadn’t anticipated?

DT: Yes, the poem is completely found. Ted Hughes made these lists of exercises for Sylvia Plath, when she was experiencing writer’s block. I came across the lists when I was doing archival research on Plath, selected the exercises I liked, and came up with the arrangement. I was thinking of David Antin’s found poem “A List of the Delusions of the Insane: What They Are Afraid Of.” The world of Plath and Hughes scholarship is so vast, I’ve never felt a sense of competition—well, there is, among the scholars, but I always felt like a poet passing as a scholar. I wasn’t in the “game” for the same reasons as the academics—advancement, attention, etc. It’s very similar to the writing world.

In terms of owning some of Plath’s belongings, that fits into my general MO as a collector. When I got into Plath research, someone said to me, “Sylvia is the new Barbie.” I have some of Plath’s hair, some of the pink Smith College memorandum paper she wrote on, some sprigs of the yew tree next to Court Green, and her glass-topped table, one of the last possessions she purchased for her apartment in London. When I’m writing about something or someone, I’ll usually want something tangible nearby, an object or a book. Talismans. Plath’s table, which sits in my living room, and which I sit next to each morning, is very special. I still sometimes look at it, can barely believe I have it. I’d eventually like to try some psychometry with it. Place one hand on the table and write, automatically, with the other. See what might come from that. God, I’d love to write a whole book that way.

IC: What else do you collect? How does collecting play a role in the making of your poems?

DT: I’ve collected many things over the years—books, vintage Barbie dolls and fashions, Yardley makeup from the sixties, dollhouse furniture, etc. I love the idea of collecting, or trying to collect, all of one thing. I grew up with that message: Collect all of them! All of this mass-produced thing. This impulse comes into play in my poems, for sure: write one haiku for each episode of a soap opera; collect and make a list poem of lipstick shades, fortune cookie fortunes, monster movies, and so on. There’s always been this desire to put all of something into a poem. Which is impossible, of course. I began, in middle age, to collect things from the past. From my past. I suppose that’s what I do in my work: collect the past. It was Robyn

Schiff who made me aware of the association between “re-collect” and “recollect.” I was telling her how I’ve collected certain things, gotten rid of them, only to collect them all over again—re-collect them. It’s the same with memories. Each time you remember something you recollect it and re-collect it. Maybe that’s the only thing I do collect—with physical objects and with words—memories.

IC: A friend of mine, a fiction writer, told me that he is obsessed with aestheticizing the past in his short stories because it turns his memories into objects. The closer a memory is to becoming an object, the greater the illusion that it is something he can get rid of. Do you try to make your memories into objects?

DT: Oh, I would say that that is the goal. There’s the way in which a good poem can turn any memory—of a person, an experience, a thing—into something concrete, so that the poem itself is an object of sorts. Language that has the tangibility of a solid, well-made thing. William Carlos Williams talks about this, doesn’t he. And/or Pound. And I know Ted Hughes does as well. Probably many others.

Writing about a memory may lessen your emotional attachment to it, but I don’t think you ever get rid of it. Nor would you want to. If anything, the writing makes it permanent. Or certainly the publishing of it does. Once you publish something, you never get rid of it.

IC: How does collection, or re-collection, impact your editorial work?

DT: Editing is very much a form of collecting. For magazines, it’s all about putting together a selection of poems I find interesting. Reading through hundreds of submissions is not unlike looking through bins of detritus at a flea market, hoping that something is going to catch my eye, some little treasure. A shiny little artifact that captures my attention for whatever reason. When you edit a poet’s collected poems, as I’ve done for several dead friends (Rachel Sherwood, Tim Dlugos, Ed Smith), you have to search out every poem they wrote and assemble them—quite obviously—into a collection. It’s a way of preserving what you love. With either objects or poems, you get to experience, over and over, the pleasure of acquiring something you consider priceless and adding it to the whole.

IC: Your earlier work references The Marvelettes, Skeeter Davis, The Beach Boys, The Chiffons, and The Supremes (the supreme of all groups). And later, The Ramones, Sparks, Brian Eno, and Patti Smith. How does the spirit of these icons filter into your poetic practice?

DT: The groups/singers in the first list appear in my poems about the music of my youth, such as “Meet the Supremes.” I don’t know that I gave it that much thought at the time, as I was writing the poems (this would have been in the 1980s), other than I was trying to commemorate the songs I’d grown up with, that meant so much, that I carry with me in subterranean ways. And the power of that music. When you hear one of those old songs on the radio, how it can transport you back in time, and seems to reignite long-lost feelings. Or better yet how those songs encapsulate the feelings, so you feel something of what you felt in the past, yet it’s all mysteriously beyond your grasp. Anne Sexton says it best in “Music Swims Back to Me”: “the song that remembers / more than I.”

The second, later list is a little different. That period in my life doesn’t feel as remote, as untouchable. It’s the music of my twenties, the music I listened to as I was becoming a writer. And very much the punk era, and the New Wave it morphed into. Whereas the earlier songs were about longing and heartache, the later were more conscious of the artist as both insider and outsider, as critic of the very culture that gave them notoriety or fame. And more rebellious, more assertive of the artist as hero. Or anti

hero. That’s why Patti Smith was so important. I idolized her. First saw her at the Roxy in Los Angeles during her Horses tour. I write about this in my poem “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.” She wasn’t the institution she is now. Her following was relatively small and devoted. A lot of people put her down, dismissed her. I had a lot of arguments about her. She was a beacon, really. She inspired courage. And that she was so up front about being a poet was extremely important. She was bringing poetry to the masses!

IC: I’m curious about your relationship to poetic constraint and language as a form of self-expression. Do you find that language holds you back as much as it is a liberation?

DT: I think constraints—any kind of rules or poetic forms—can provide a structure to work within, can create a kind of useful tension, and also give you purpose, a mission to fulfill. It takes some of the pressure off what you want to say and how you want to say it. By concentrating on the constraints you’ve set up for yourself, the words can come more naturally, more unselfconsciously. When I was writing the poems in Plasticville, I thought of the various forms as toys. This brought an element of play into the process. I think every poem in that book is a form. My favorite of all poetic forms is the pantoum. The repetition of lines from stanza to stanza down the page produces this downward pull, which makes me think of a Jacob’s ladder. Do you know that toy? Those flopping wooden blocks. In general, I think constraints appeal to my obsessive nature. Language certainly has its limitations, insofar as each writer has their own lexicon, their own way of saying things. For the past few years I’ve been writing prose poems, and I’m finding this freeing. It feels looser, more relaxed. Maybe more expansive. Even though there’s no discernable shape (though I guess a block of prose is a shape), each piece has its own poetic logic and (usually unconscious) sense of order.

IC: A pantoum is undeniably a Jacob’s ladder. An elegy, I think, would be an Etch A Sketch? And a litany—the Chatty Cathy? I’m awfully charmed by this notion that a poetic constraint can embody the essence of a toy. What other toys have you manifested through form?

DT: There is, in fact, a Chatty Cathy poem in Plasticville: “Chatty Cathy Villanelle.” That seemed the perfect form for that doll, since she often repeated herself when you pulled the string at the back of her neck, and the villanelle is all about repetition. There’s a sonnet crown about Marilyn Monroe’s final days. A cento of pink lines from Dickinson, Sexton, and Plath. A sonnet composed of titles of monster movies. Couplets of fortune

Courtesy of David Trinidad

cookie fortunes—that rhyme, of course. A poem in terza rima about the troll dolls that Greta Garbo kept under her couch. Naturally when you use a poetic form to write about a toy, it’s doubly toy-like.

IC: What form would Barbie be?

DT: I think the best form for Barbie would be a calligram. In the shape of that vintage silhouette Mattel used in marketing—her profile, with those puffed-out bangs and that famous ponytail. That ponytail that seemed alive! Actually, I once did a Barbie calligram in the shape of one of her iconic outfits, the sleek nightclub gown. But her profile would be better.

IC: In an interview with Richard Siken, you mention that your Barbie collection got its start to escape the competitive nature of the New York poetry scene. Can you speak more to your Barbie obsession and how the collection got its start?

DT: In my book Notes on a Past Life, there’s a poem called “A Few Words About My Collecting” that begins “How many Barbie dolls will it take /

To soothe your wounds?” In this poem I deliberately tried to explore the connection between collecting and the deep disappointment I experienced after moving to New York in the late 1980s. I assumed (incorrectly) that the poetry scene on the Lower East Side would be a nurturing bohemia, a community full of goodwill and mutual support. Those days were long gone—if they ever existed. What I found instead were monsters. Monsters of ego. Monsters of competitiveness. Monsters of pettiness. It had been a lifelong dream, to be an artist in New York, but it wasn’t what I wanted. It’s no coincidence that the Barbie collecting started around this time. It was a way to give myself something I’d desperately wanted as a child, but was denied because I was a boy. And as I say in the poem, an attempt to soothe my wounds.

IC: Don’t forget Monsters of Networking! There’s so much social pressure to make a career out of poetry, win the right awards, attend the most prestigious MFA programs, publish in the most glamorous journals. What can be done to successfully avoid the competition without avoiding the capital PC: Poetry Community?

DT: It’s a matter of priorities, isn’t it? Are you ambitious for recognition, money, prizes? Or is your ambition to write the best poems you can write? If your focus is on the art, then everything else will fall into place. I believe that; I’ve lived that. I think there’s a way to be part of the poetry community without succumbing to its pitfalls. But you’ve also got to keep a reasonable distance or find a place within yourself that can’t be touched or corrupted.

IC: Back to Barbie! What was the first and most recent addition to your collection? If Mattel asked you to design your own Barbie, who would she be?

DT: The first vintage Barbie item I bought, in the early 1990s, was a miniature plastic record player. I was at the flea market on 23rd Street in New York (my partner had dragged me there; I didn’t particularly want to go). It was at the bottom of a cardboard box I was idly rummaging through. The contents of someone’s storage unit that had been repossessed. This made me sad. Someone’s possessions, including family photographs, that were up for grabs. Being pawed through by strangers. Anyway, I was looking through this box and came across this miniature record player, which immediately (and viscerally) triggered a childhood memory. I bought it for a quarter, brought it home. It seemed a magical little object, that had somehow survived the decades. I didn’t know all that Barbie stuff still existed; I thought it had vanished with time. When I realized it could be located, possessed, I was off and running.

The most recent purchase, earlier this year, was the vintage Barbie outfit “Silken Flame,” in its original packaging, NRFB. I already had one, but it was the later packaging. I wanted the earlier packaging—the first printing, as it were. Oh, the foibles of collecting. Don’t ask.

I wish Mattel would put out a line of Valley of the Dolls dolls. Based on the three actresses from the movie—patty Duke, Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate. There would be outfits they wore in the film, the gowns designed by Travilla. There could even be a Susan Hayward doll, with a wig that could be torn off during “the wig scene.” Mattel did produce a Barbie with wigs in the sixties. She was called Fashion Queen.

IC: Speaking of Sharon Tate, what are your thoughts on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood? Specifically, the ending.

DT: I thought the first two hours of the movie were great. But that ending, it ruined it all for me. A real bait-and-switch. One that trivializes, I feel, the victims. And I took no pleasure in seeing the Manson murderers themselves viciously murdered. They’ve spent their entire lives in prison. I was a teenager in California when the murders occurred in 1969. I’d been obsessed with the movie of Valley of the Dolls, had cut out pictures of Sharon Tate from movie magazines and pasted them into a scrapbook. I lived in Chatsworth. It turned out the murderers lived only a few miles from our house, at the Spahn Ranch. I feel like the murders have haunted me my entire life. I’ve tried to exorcise the horror in poems: “The Shower Scene in Psycho,” “Sharon Tate and Friends the Moment Before.” So I was offended by the way Tarantino handled the subject, by his own brand of fake history. I lost respect for him. But I’ll always love Jackie Brown—a perfect film.

IC: “A Poem Under the Influence” starts “Last night I dreamt of Barbie.” Each stanza contains the word “pink,” lines that exceed the width of the page, and a confession. The language is like Barbie’s wardrobe—so pink, so stylized, so glamorous—and really “dresses the poem up.” We’re never left bored, we never lose interest, but there’s an expectation that until we reach the end of the poem, the form will continue to do its “thing.” The same could be said about Barbie, don’t you think? If memory is a collection of the past, the form of the poem becomes a display case, to better showcase the memories the speaker collects.

DT: I think that’s it exactly. The poem as a kind of vitrine. Full of actual objects, like Barbie, as well as memories. Doesn’t that imply that the memories are just as valuable, just as display-worthy, as the objects? In the months leading up to writing “A Poem Under the Influence,” I jotted down

in a notebook any memory I caught myself remembering. In other words, I started paying attention to what I was thinking, what was going on in my mind. Observing it, so to speak, rather than just doing it. I figured what I was remembering, and in some cases re-remembering, was important. That I should take note of it. After I had collected enough of these memories, I decided to put as many of them as I could into a long New York Schoolesque poem that I wanted to write. In a way that’s the overriding constraint of the poem. Every time I included one of those memories, I highlighted it in the notebook—with a pink highlighter, of course.

IC: The most expensive Barbie doll could lose value in an instant. It’s the same with memory. Depending on how events proceed in life, memories increase or decrease in importance.

DT: That makes me think of stocks rising and falling in value! From experience, I can say that I never know when a memory is going to surface and demand my attention, and insist its way into a poem. Out of the darkness of the past an object appears . . . . When I was young I presumed time was linear. The older I’ve gotten, the more time seems to fold back on itself— the past overlaying itself on the present, like a transparency. But then I’ve always been interested in the past, and in memory. In remembering. Discovering what’s buried in that darkness. Perhaps that’s a byproduct of trauma, I don’t know. Maybe for others life is that straight line. And maybe that’s healthier. They simply keep moving forward and don’t look back.

IC: Given the title of the poem, under the influence, the speaker’s relationship to sobriety, and the poem’s great length, my brain immediately connected the form to the phrase “recovery is not linear.” Poetry is linear, but often reflects what’s not. Healing, for example. Or time, as you said. Can you elaborate on how form has the power to reveal things beyond the language itself?

DT: I suspect it has something to do with the process of writing—that it’s a mysterious search for, what, some sort of answer. The desire, or even the idea, to write a poem comes from a need to explore something that I’m emotionally attached to but don’t completely understand—it feels somewhat out of control, something that causes disquiet, angst. I either want the poem to help me stop feeling that feeling, or help me to understand it more fully, more consciously. The form facilitates this, makes it possible. It’s the working out of a “problem.” Artistically and emotionally. After the fact, I learn from the poem; it often takes me a long time to intuit things

from it. Of course what a poem reveals to me is very different from what it reveals to a reader.

IC: It’s easy to assume the “I” in your poems is the “I” that is you, David Trinidad. Especially in your poem “David Trinidads.” Even when the “I” is somewhat confessional, do you think of it as a persona?

DT: Yes, I do think of the David in my poems as a persona, a literary construct. But it’s tricky. When I’m writing the poem, I’m writing it as me. There’s no division between me as writer and me on the page. It has to feel that way, in order to say what I have to say; my guard has to be completely down.

IC: What is the worst advice you’ve received as a poet, but also what is the best?

DT: I can’t think of anything specific, but I’d have to say that any advice that makes you doubt your ability to achieve your desires, or limits your total freedom of expression, is bad advice. In a writing workshop in the seventies, I heard: “Writers should write about what they know.” That seemed like good advice. The only problem was I was young and didn’t know very much. Though I’m sure I must have thought I knew something. Oh, and Marguerite Duras: “You can talk about your life your whole life long.”