"Closer to Knowing", an interview with DéLana Dameron

DéLana Dameron’s debut poetry collection How God Ends Us (University of South Carolina Press, 2009) rests on my lap. It is raining and the trees intermittently shake the rain from their branches. I’m thinking back on the first conversation I had with DéLana, an energetic discussion of poetics. I hadn’t read any of her poems, but by the time the chat had come to end, I’d already proposed an interview. DéLana speaks about poems and poetries with sharp clarity and refreshing honesty; she’s quick to tell you what she doesn’t know, and quick to reveal what she does know. She’s a natural conversationalist and intensely intellectual. The poems in How God Ends Us spark with her wit; indeed, it’s difficult for me to read this book without seeing a stream of streetlights popping on and on and on. I’ve walked the streets with this book, read it in bit and pieces—at St. Marks, fresh out of its brown paper bag, on trains and at coffee shops, on my front stoop, and here, on this couch. This is a hard book to read in one sitting, a book that deals with tough subjects, that is confrontational and compassionate, reserved and lustful, fully bodied and heightened in its spirit. DéLana’s poems are visionary, and move with the confidence of a woman who is beginning to come to terms with the blessings she’s been given: poet, seeker, lover, custodian of spirits.

The following interview was conducted over three days via email.

Hi, DéLana. Thanks for agreeing to participate in this interview. I'd like to begin by acknowledging that you are at a writer's retreat and you've taken time out of your work to participate in this interview. Would you care to talk about this retreat? Where are you and what are you working on?

Hi, Metta. Thanks for doing this! I am writing to you from Ithaca, NY. The landscape is definitely different from my Harlem studio. Much more quiet. I find myself missing the sirens and the sounds of Saint Nicholas Ave. I am currently beginning my second of four weeks at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. For the purposes of saying I went away to do "work", I'll say I'm working on finishing/editing two poetry manuscripts. I also brought what I call a first draft of a novel, but given the pace that I've adopted here, I doubt I'll get to it.


You recently posted a very beautiful photograph of about 36 pages of a manuscript in progress. You'd pasted the pages on the wall, and I kept imagining your words speaking to you while you were awake and asleep. Could you talk a bit about your process for putting together your new manuscript?

Well, there are two manuscripts. One manuscript, Cartographer, already had some semblance of order. I felt I needed to "see" it differently, so I put it up on one of two bulletin boards in the studio. The second one, Suture & Cleave, is ironically older, but needs some more guidance. I had less of an idea of what I wanted when I started it. Before I committed it to the bulletin board, I spread out all of the poems associated with that project on the floor. I picked up what I knew I wanted to be the first poem and read it out loud. I like to name the things that I do. I called it a type of call and response ordering - something I'd never done before. I call out to the poems gathered by reading the poem in my hand, and "answer" by reading what might be the next poem. It felt right for this one.

Your first collection, How God Ends Us (University of South Carolina Press, 2009), begins with the poem "Lament", a provocative apostrophe poem to God. How comfortable where you with starting your debut collection with this poem?

A friend found that poem buried in earlier versions of this book. Really, I didn't believe it to be that big of a deal. I guess when you move it to the front, and have it be the place where the title of the book is “couched”, it's a different thing, right? So anyways, the poem "Lament" also had a different title -- both the poem and the book. "Lament" was titled "How God Ends Us" and "How God Ends Us" (the book) was something different. The friend said that the title of the poem could work as a great book title. I was hesitant. But I listened, as those not as close to the work can sometimes see it for what it is, for what it wants to be. I see things for what I want it to be, and at that time I wanted that book to be something different. When I brought the poem forward, the poems inside changed, the narrative changed, and I wasn't sure if I was going to leave it in the beginning.

I know as a reader I like to look in the Table of Contents for the title poems. I always have such high hopes for title poems and what they should be. I know they should be strong to have such a big, flashy marker. I knew that if I was going to title the book "How God Ends Us" - which, only because I've had to justify it and think about it as a label of a collection instead of a single poem - I didn't want the readers to open up the book titled "How God Ends Us" and then turn directly to a poem with the same name. In changing the poem’s title, there is still a bit of discovery in it. There's still a chance to not run the reader away. So, I think I only became comfortable with putting it in the front after I changed its title.

Could you talk about the form of this poem? As well, there are several poems dotted through the collection that work within a certain established or invented form and/or rhetorical device. Could you speak to your interest in form and rhetorical strategies?

Sometimes, I don't know the thing I want to do until I've done it. For "Lament," I had a notebook full of notes and lines and images. I had these images in this book that sort of felt like they "went together". I tend to say when I'm stuck with writing something, but have some of the elements, then I turn to form. So I had these six or so lines in a journal and I wanted to "do something" -- I was sitting in a coffeeshop with a friend and we were having our writing time and I had nothing to write. I thought, how can I make these lines work in a poem? I thought about the different forms of poetry that I knew that incorporated a full line and used it in a repetitive fashion -- the less writing I had to do! I enjoy the pantoum for this. Outside of its poetic beauty, you only really have to write half a poem because of the nature of repetition of the lines. But I had six lines, and I didn't know what to fill in between lines like, "How God does end us" or "Disaster is the moist inside of a lie" or "spirits in the spaces of the house." So I thought about the nature of the sestina, and the way the end words rotate. I put the two together: the pantoum and the sestina. I jokingly call it a pantina. Maybe it's been done before? I haven't seen it.

Side note: I was talking to another friend about this poem, as I get many questions. Perhaps its positioning in the manuscript or its message or its form. I told him that I felt that form was a one-hit wonder; maybe the form and the message were meant to be together, and for that one time only. It's tough to find six other lines you wouldn't mind seeing six more times. However, while up here in and around the gorges of Ithaca, I've managed to do a second pantina. I'll let you know if I decide to keep it or not.

My response to this question seems to be getting long and winding. But I do want to say, I love form. I don't believe this manuscript portrays my level of love and trust and engagement with all types of form. The other two manuscripts, more so. I believe when I have the words to say but not sure how to say them/present them, I turn to form. Most of the poems in this collection already had a way of speaking, a form when they were written. I just had to obey and write them down. There was little coaxing.

I appreciate you talking openly and reflectively about journaling and being so clear in delineating journal writing and poem writing. Many writers, I believe, would love to hear how writers think about the two having very different functions. . .

How do you balance (do you?) poetic restraint with exploding emotions in poems?

I suppose my poetics are rooted in the emotional. And the narrative, the story. So my poetry believes it exists for emotions while telling the story. But you have to tell the story. You have to tell the story well. You cannot let emotions get in the way of telling the story. I have journals for that. Maybe it's about compartmentalizing? So the tears and all have been shed in those pages. The why why why’s have been asked and asked (and is asked daily) and fingers pointed and name calling in those moleskin pages. So I don't use poetry as catharsis in that way. I have outlets. But I do use poetry to portray/convey/paint something that I believe others can relate to. When I decided to try and put these rather personal stories into poems, I did not want to use names. In my personal journals I use names. I think names in my family poems would distance the reader from the action/emotion that is happening - preparing a body for a funeral, massaging the stiffening joints of the ailing. Maybe that is the answer: I restrain by withholding names. For example, there are two grandmothers I write about yet in the poems I don't distinguish between the maternal or paternal grandmother...they are essentially "grandmother". Only one is still living....through the book, and in my real life.

Your response to calling of names has me particularly intrigued as does the wonderful definition you offer of "ancestor". Part of what I found compelling about your manuscript, in fact, had to do with this notion of naming (not identifying, in terms of formal names) the pain, of naming the spirit, of naming that which haunts and rises and builds (I'm thinking in particular of the poems "How Quickly the Sun Comes", "Closer to Knowing", "Parable of the Hungry Missionary", "All Hallow's Eve", and "It is Written"). Does the naming settle the account, does it open up new avenues, new possibilities? Do you learn from your own errors, from the errors of others? What does the space of the poem teach you that the space of the journal can not? (Here, I'm thinking of the pair of poems "The Red Thread" and "How Quickly the Sun Comes".)

Metta, I like this question for that it asks me to think and so “name” here in my response. You are asking me to name my naming, and perhaps it is the settling I am not wanting to do. Firstly, yes, the space of the poem allows me to feel, to process differently than the space of the journal. It is more controlling. It demands a bit more shaping – a certain deliberateness that works in conjunction with the journaling…maybe like something you turn and twist in order to see it differently. Or like the artist that has this huge landscape she wants to paint, but walks around with a small framing device so she can better see her focus.

So then, my journal is the large landscape – the mountains and marsh, the gorges (here, Ithaca is seeping into my response), and the poems are the smaller frames of the bigger picture.

The act of writing the poems did allow me to settle the sorrow, the accounts…in most of the cases deal with a loss, although one could argue that all of the poems – even the more sensuous or “love” poems – deal with a certain loss. I think turning over the whole essay, “Poetry is not a luxury” by Audre Lorde would serve as a sufficient answer to this chain of questions. In it she says that poetry serves as an illumination for “those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to b birthed, but already felt.” So, I suppose the journaling allows the feeling, and the poetry – because of the uses of metaphor and imagery – gives light to things I might not have considered or seen until I tried to sit down and write the poem or later, read the poem after it was written.

Lorde also says - and I underlined and starred this – that we women can “train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared,” and that is the heart of what I try to do, I think. It is the heart of what I was trying to say all along…and it is with the writing and my ability to write and my allowing myself to write that the heavy stuff “[loses its] control over [me]” – so to borrow my grandmother’s language, by the time I get to the poem, it serves as a method for “rebuking” the emotions that could consume me. So, poetry is not a luxury, but a process for dealing.


Ah! A process for dealing, yes yes. (Of course, my head has me thinking of a great game of spades, "the hand we're dealt" and how do we play that hand? Poems? Poems that confront the thing that hurts?) You mention Lorde, who also makes a statement, perhaps in Zami, that while confrontation makes her ill, it's sometimes the most necessary and urgent thing to do, to get at the name. (Am I dancing around truth? Perhaps. . .). But let me ask you, what is your process of transposing your feelings into language? You spoke about finding a form to fit your emotions and ideas and complexities, could you talk about finding the language to fit your feelings? Does this make sense? (And I must sidenote to the readers, I'm thinking here of DéLana's earlier poems in the book, and some of the later ones, where she addresses a mother.)

You know, I'm speaking a lot about journaling, but I think my life as a writer would not have happened without it. Indeed, my life right now might not have happened without it. I think the journaling helps to initially fit the feelings into language. When I teach poetry writing workshops, I plan a segment of time for writers to compose a block of prose. Generally, that prose is prompted. Sometimes, I prompt myself by keeping a word bank and choose several words and free write while trying to incorporate the words. I know a poem is at the end of it all, but like marathon running, I try to pace myself and just focus on getting the words. Maybe the idea of putting together a jigsaw puzzle works better: so, it is easier for me to spread all of the pieces on the table or floor and fit them together that way and watch the image emerge, than to just pick up piece by piece and try and figure out where it should go. Surprising things happen when I mine and sluice the prose for lines or images or phrases. Poems like "Cuspidor", especially, came from a process like this.

Also, I think in analogies and similes, and if I find one that I like (in "The Red Thread", I tried to plan on this idea that a bird will abandon its nest if it senses the presence of an "other") then I try to see if I have an aspect of my life that I could play within poetry.

Other times, it is - one could say - already written. That did not mean to point directly to the poem, "It is written", but this point will fit here too. Everything that happens in poems like, "All Hallows Eve" happened as I said it. The magic is then, that it happened and I was able to see it and live it and write it. Poems like, "Excavation" could be part of my filling-in process that I named (and the poem admits that, by the speaker saying, "I imagine you, Mama..", although the discovery that the poem speaks about...is already there.)

In the poem "My Grandfather Wouldn't Know Me if He Saw", you end with the statement: "Clairvoyance is a gift/I will not accept". (31) Do you see poet as a gift?

I do see poet as a gift. It is given. Sometimes it is realized, sometimes unrealized. Sometimes cloned in a weaker state and sold at a higher price. Sometimes rejected. My father rejected his poet self. I think I picked it up. Or maybe, he was The Giver. But I hate this idea of "gift" as some thing that is given and runs out and is not given to everyone. I don't want to go down that road, but I believe it is a gift, and many people have it, but I also believe it is also something that can be done without gift (though we could argue whether or not it’s any good), without "that thing" -- and sadly, that takes away from the credibility of others, but there you have it: it can be (is!) manufactured and sold wholesale.

The poem before “My Grandfather” sort of "accepts" the idea of clairvoyance or seeing as an inheritance (the poem "Inheritance"). The ability to "see" (as in dreams -- the dead, the dove, the "spirits hiding in the spaces of the house no one inhabits"...can I quote myself? I just quoted myself.). It's interesting that I rejected it/ did/sometimes do reject it. But I believe my ability to "see", my gift, is connected to me as a poet. I use my seeing and feeling gift and apply it to poetry -- an art form full of images.


The first section of How God Ends Us is a series of libations of sorts; you call forth names of those who have passed (and even in your Acknowledgments, you call forth the names "so there is a tomorrow" (to quote you quoting Sonia Sanchez)). Do you remember as an act of love, an act of learning, an act of maintaining memory? (There is no "or" there, and please take this where you want. I'm mostly asking you to speak to your dedication to the spirits of your ancestors. As well, I'm curious about the obligation to self. In "My Grandfather", the narrator "double-fist[s] death" despite her grandfather's passing.)

When I was younger I wanted to be an archeologist. I wanted to go around with my brushes and shovels and dig up ruins and study what people before me left behind. After I decided that that was too much science, I moved to wanting to study history – to piece together stories based on fragments of information – to be an archeologist of stories. Part of understanding the study of history, and working, too, as an archeologist, is that one takes pieces and pieces and creates whole epics…and somehow, the gone keep on living.

My writing is an attempt at fossilizing my family’s history. We are not big on oral history. In truth, the grandmother that died was big on storytelling, but I was not big on listening then, so much of my writing, my attempt at preserving is also a fabrication, a filling-in. Much like what paleontologists do to create a fully rendered dinosaur skeleton from a few bones found.

I suppose this concern for preservation is at once a learning, a making, a maintaining and love. I love my family and so I want there to be a tomorrow for us.

In referencing the second part of your question, I should state that I have a hard time with this term “ancestor”. I did not grow up with this term on my tongue, and I think it is used in so many different ways that I do not know how to use it in reference to my “dedication to the spirits of my ancestors”. Call it generational. I just have this distanced relationship to the word “ancestor” and believe my dead or gone are just that – my dead or gone. For me to think ancestor is to think of someone with which I had no personal relationship. The people –the flesh and blood I have smelled and touched and kissed and hugged – I write about are real, and my dedication is only that they be known or remembered.

To myself – well, the I in this collection is slippery. My family is just getting to a point where they are reading the collection and talking to me about it. My father that poem and “The space between,” mostly the poems where it seems if I am connected somehow to the speaker, then it is a direct correlation, and my father straight up asked if I was suicidal. I believe I asked myself that. Maybe that is where the idea “double-fisting death”. My grandfather died of lung cancer. I was around and alive and chided him about smoking after they found the mass on his lungs. My sister and my mom and my grandmother smoked most of my life growing up. I hated it. I hated them all for smoking. My other grandfather – whom I never met - died when my father was in high school…we suspect it was because of his drinking. He did a lot of things to his family because of his drinking. I had a neighbor growing up who was found dead in his own blood from liver failure. We associate it to the fact that I never saw him without a drink in his hand. So I find myself one day drinking and smoking, and knowing the consequences of my actions, but doing it still. And writing about it. And holding myself accountable. That is at the heart of all of this – the majority of the obviously self-related poems, a self-reflection, a self-accountability. Maybe this collection is a huge obligation to self – more so than I thought.

I'd like to turn the tide one more time, and begin to wind down the conversation. I'm very curious about your new collections. Is there anything that you're free to share about Suture & Cleave? If I had permission to ask, I'd ask what are some of the concepts that you're looking at? What are some of the threads that run through the collection?

I’m still settling into deciding how to speak publicly about my project Suture & Cleave. It is a project that I believe best marries my love for history and poetry. I should give a brief story about how I came about the content. I received my BA in Third World and Non-Western history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Part of receiving your diploma in this project is by conducting a research project and writing a thirty-page paper. The semester I decided to start this project, the only topic in my concentration was the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Ultimately, I wrote my research paper on how Palestinian civilians portrayed themselves in Palestinian feature films based on the history of the conflict. So, I had this wealth of stories swimming around and felt a need to write the stories into poems. This collection probably has my highest concentration of form. Too, because I do not have first-person experience to this situation, and didn’t want to handle the whole project in third-person, the poems are persona, and all rooted in real accounts of people experiencing their own erasure in war.


I'd also ask, but this is a secondary question, how do you know when one collection has reached its end? As someone who has two poetry manuscripts, one upstart novel, and now two beginnings of two short story collections sitting on one Lexar disk, I know the difficulties of having all of these projects. I'm beginning to suspect they're bartering with one another, and the stories are trying to kill off the poems. How hard is it for you to juggle two manuscripts?


I don’t know that a collection has reached its end. I have this poem, “What life were we expecting” that I read sometimes at readings and say if I were still writing How God Ends Us, it would be like an addendum. Cartographer – a book considering how we map out our emotional and physical selves in relation to the city – I believe has a more definite end. I know I am just polishing at this point. Suture is the hardest to “know” – it is also a project I’ve been working on the longest. It is the song that never ends. I have to decide when I want to stop it, right? I have to decide when I am done trying to tell my piece of the story…and it’s not because I run out of materials for poems – everyday something happens in the news in Gaza or the West Bank or East Jerusalem that would fit perfectly into the story I am trying to tell. But eventually, you have to see an end, and this collection more so than any, I believe will have the hardest time to tie up.

As for juggling them, I hold my breath for times and places like these when I can stop and breathe for a while. I definitely have to have on different hats at different times. My propensity to compartmentalize aids in this. I have heavy moments of creating without as much editing, and then I put on the edit mode and work that path. And I go where the creativity takes me. In Ithaca, it’s been all about Suture & Cleave.

Two final questions, and then I'll let you get back to your residency at Saltonstall, and congratulations on that residency! Are you having fun writing towards this new collection; any poems that are playful in subject or tone or construction, for example?

Unfortunately, the subject matter makes it hard to have fun writing towards this collection. I'm looking for some things, though. However, I did notice that when I read some of the pieces out loud in the "call and response" manner I spoke of earlier, the sheer nature of some of the forms turns the words into a type of song. A certain rhythm emerges, and the rhyming lifts it a bit. So it's less trudging through mud, if you will. I mean, you know what you're reading is heavy stuff, but my hope is -- that is, what I found reading it to myself after some time away -- that it's not as heavy as it may seem.


& finally, inquiring minds would love to know: what is your favorite word, phrase, attitude, and activity?

Favorite word: for a long time, when I learned the word, I looked for every opportunity to use the word "feign". I don't know that I have a current favorite. I'm taking applications.
Favorite phrase: My initial response was to give you my new year's motto. It's carried me through 2008 and I renewed it in 2009: "It's a new year and I'm a grown ass woman." A phrase I use a lot: "Don't judge me." but not in a tone that sounds as serious as putting it here right now does.
Favorite attitude: being skeptical/questioning
Favorite activity: I've come to have this certain relationship with the spinning/cycling class at my gym. I miss it up here in the mountains. It was a great de-stressor.

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You can find DéLana, How God Ends Us, and a reading schedule on her website, www.delanadameron.com

You can find me here, where I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

In Summer,

Metta Sáma