Dorianne Laux
(B. 1952) |
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| Photo credit: John Campbell |
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Dorianne Laux is one the most well-regarded and widely read poets writing in America today. Her sensitively crafted poems evoke recognition in the reader, inviting their full participation. Ms. Laux writes candidly about all aspects of life, sharing the torments, the pain and finality of death, the joys and sweetness of love, and a plethora of other subjects. In her strong and energetic words, she encompasses a world-view finely attuned to the rhythms of life. She writes with a sure touch, a delightful sense of humor, and unerring instincts. Her work is layered by wisdom, astute observations, and colorful and bold imagery as she displays a mastery and purpose in her writing.
Ms. Laux's poetic diction is powerful, laced with the unflinching honesty of hardship and suffering. Readers are blown away by the integrity of the poet whose work never strikes a false note, nor is labored or forced, but rather, styled with a natural pacing that grows and builds toward a climax.
Dorianne Laux is the author of two previous collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Ltd., and is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Joys of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997), chosen as an alternate selection by several bookclubs. This superb volume, in which their combined voices enrich, teach and entertain, sold more than 60,000 copies.
Ms. Laux’s several poetry collections have been published to high acclaim, and she is the recipient of numerous awards: She won two NEA’s, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and an Oregon Book Award. Her second book, What We Carry, was a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and her fourth book, Facts about the Moon was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Award.
Dorianne Laux’s poem, "The Shipfitter's Wife" was chosen by Robert Bly for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1999. Her work can also be heard on National Public Radio's "The Writer's Almanac" hosted by Garrison Keillor. Ms. Laux was invited to read at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 2001 by Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz.
Dorianne Laux’s poetry has been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese, such is her universal appeal.
Personal Journey
Dorianne Laux was born in 1952 in Augusta, Maine. She is of Irish, French and Algonquin Indian heritage. She began writing seriously in her early twenties, after her daughter was born. She was a young child when she shared her poems with her family and was fortunate to receive encouragement and support from them. Her mother read Frost, Sandburg and e.e. cummings. Laux believes the love of music and art that surrounded her as a child influenced her involvement with poetry. When Dorianne was growing up, the poets who first influenced her were Neruda, Sharon Olds and Carolyn Forche. Featured below is a poem from her book, Smoke:
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Wing
For Miguel Hernandez
(1910-1942)
Madrid, 1934
Until a Shepard boy from Orihuela
climbed a tree, curled his bare toes
around a high olive branch, buried his face
among the leaves and whistled, Neruda
had not heard a nightingale. |
In a previous interview, Ms. Laux says:
“Neruda was huge. I loved his heart, his imagery, his world vision. Later, Sharon Olds who I admired for her fearlessness and her metaphors, and Carolyn Forche for her worldliness, her images, her strong voice and stripped down style. And later, Anne Sexton and Ruth Stone.”
Dorianne Laux worked in various capacities when younger, and returned to school in her thirties. She studied English with creative writing emphasis and received her B.A. with honors from Mills College. Among Dorianne’s teachers were Chana Bloch, Stephen Radcliff and Steve Kowit.
Her first poem submitted to the New Yorker was rejected, but after taking some night classes at a local junior college, her work was accepted by the San Diego Poets Press. The few acceptances she received, kept her in the loop. Since then Ms. Laux’s work has been published in such luminaries as Agni, The American Voice, Art/Life, Barrow Street, Best American Poetry, The Beloit Poetry, The Harvard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Washington Post, Double Take, The Best American Poetry 1999 and countless others.
Dorianne Laux was also closely involved in writer’s groups. She attended the Napa Valley Poetry Conference in the 80’s. Some of the poets who taught there were Robert Hass, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Pinsky, Carolyn Forche, Frank Bidart and Tess Gallagher.
Laux attended Alan Soldofsky’s “Poems in Progress” classes at UC Berkeley Extension. Among her classmates numbered Jane Hirshfield and Stephanie Marlis.
Academic Life
Ms. Laux worked in the “Poets in the Schools” program in Berkeley and Oakland for about six years and eventually moved to Eugene to teach at the University of Oregon. She held the post of Professor and Director of the University of Oregon’s Program in Creative Writing, and was core faculty at the Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. Ms. Laux taught at the University of Oregon in Eugene since 1994. Ms. Laux also made appearances at conferences and festivals around the country.
Dorianne Laux teaches yearly at Esalen in Big Sur, Program. Tomales Bay, Aspen, Spoleto, Italy, and has taught at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Aspen Summer Words, the Nebraska Summer Writer’s Workshops, The Napa Valley Poetry Conference, Hassayampa, Truro Center for the Arts, among others, and will teach next summer at The Provincetown Center for the Arts.
Currently, Dorianne Laux is serving as professor at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, poet, Joe Millar.
Dorianne, the poet
Dorianne Laux’s beautiful collections spill forth with poems that breathe, laugh, sigh, spit, make love and weep; her poems are alive. They are large as life, and as unmalleable. Some of them are breathtakingly erotic poems, some light and airy, some of a tenuous gravitas, and some, poems that are delicate as a whisper:
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Cello
“When a dead tree falls in a forest
It often falls into the arms
Of a living tree. The dead,
Thus embraced, rasp in the wind,”
(From: Facts about the Moon) |
In another poem, “Trees are Time,” (current issue) each exquisite word is weighted with meaning, each phrase sparkles with clarity. In her wisdom, Ms. Laux illustrates how pain and love co-habit with each other. Her words carry a rich and potent lyricism that lingers, long after the last line has been read.
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(From Hummingbird)
“We buried the hummingbird
in his mantle of light, buried
him deep in the loam, one eye
staring into the earth's fiery
core, the other up through
the door in the sky.” |
Laux’s poems are energetic and driven, as if the poet won’t rest until she has spent every last breath telling us what she must. Her poems seem to have a life of their own and often, as with all great poems, they are capable of drawing blood. Her poem “Last Words,” from Smoke, is deeply poignant:
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“How many losses does it take to stop a heart,
to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?
Each one came rushing through the ones he left.
Mouths open. Last words flown up into the trees.” |
Ms.Laux’s poems are rooted deep in the poet’s heart and soul and they seem to erupt with a force that leaves the reader astounded. When there is a silence, it is not an empty one, but one that speaks in loud whispers. In her newest book, Facts about the Moon, Laux does not allow maudlin sentiment to muddy the clear, contemplative beauty of this poem:
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Moon in the Window
I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder,
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets. |
Dorianne’s voice is always human. She captures our insecurities, imperfections, losses, emotional highs and frustrations. She feels deeply, and even more important, she understands with a compassionate and non-judgmental heart.
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(From Bakersfield, 1969)
“When I look
at this picture I think I might not even
remember this boy if he hadn’t taken it
and given it to me, written his name under mine
on the back. I stopped seeing him
after that thing with his mother. I didn’t know
I didn’t know anything yet. I liked him.
That’s what I remember. That,
and the I-don’t-know-what degree heat
that rubbed up against the trailer’s metal sides,
steamed in through the cracks between the door
and porthole windows, pressed down on us
from the ceiling and seeped through the floor,
crushing us into the damp sheets. How we endured it,
sweat streaming down our naked bodies, the air
sucked from our lungs as we slept. Taj Mahal says
If you ain’t scared, you ain’t right. Back then
I was scared most of the time. But I acted
hard, tough, like I knew every street.
What I liked about him was that he wasn’t acting.
Even his sweat tasted sweet.”
(from Superman: The Chapbook, Red Dragonfly Press, 2008) |
Her voice is fresh and spirited, often blending comedy and solemnity in the same poem, with a new way of looking at things. The intelligent playfulness in this poem is delightful:
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From Mick Jagger (World Tour, 2008)
“He stands on stage
after spot-lit stage, yowling
with his rubber mouth. If you
turn off the sound he’s
a ruminating bovine,
a baby’s face tasting his first
sour orange or spitting
spooned oatmeal out.”
(Previously published in Diode Journal) |
She takes you right into that moment she describes, vivid and alive. Her details bring intense imagery to life. Laux has built a solid reputation as a poet, partly on the strength of her delicately beautiful erotic pieces, and as a writer who really understands and loves her craft.
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From “The Life of Trees”
“If trees could speak
they wouldn’t, only hum some low
green note, roll their pinecones
down the empty streets and blame it,
with a shrug, on the wind.”
(From “Facts about the Moon”) |
Dorianne Laux’s poetry collections
The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1997) co-authored with Kim Addonizio, which was chosen as an alternative selection by the Book of the Month Club.
Awake (1990) nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry.
What We Carry (1994), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Smoke (2000). BOA Editions, Ltd 2000
Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton 2005), Winner of the Oregon Book Award, finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Superman: The Chapbook (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008)
Dorianne effortlessly draws the reader in, and speaks with a quiet authority that commands attention. It takes courage to uncover vulnerabilities, yet she is unflinching in her constant search for the truth. She takes what is familiar and filters it with a freshness that is compelling.
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From Olympia
“I convinced Manet to paint me with a tinge of ocher
in his brush—true color of our world—yellow
of jaundice, syphilis, death,
Each line indelicate, flowers messy, splattered
on the canvas, wrapped in the stiff waxy paper
used to carry home butchered
meat, gutted fish used later to take the bones
to the trash.”
(From: Smoke) |
One cannot separate the poet from the person, and it seems that the greater a poet is, the less height of manner they seem to have about them, as if they have assimilated all the mysteries of existence. As a person, Dorianne is accessible, and like her poetry, just as real and full-blooded. She inhabits the air with a comfortable generosity of spirit that comes from loving, suffering and forgiveness, a maturity and inner strength, and a depth from where her poems are given voice.
Dorianne Laux dips her quill into an inkwell of life’s blood. Her poems are driven with passion, energy, motion and heart, all infused with a rare artistry and grace.
Ami Kaye, October 2008
(We thank Dorianne Laux for her gracious permission to use all materials for this feature)
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