Deborah Landau’s fourth book of poems, Soft Targets, is out this spring. Her previous collections are The Uses of the Body and The Last Usable Hour, both Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included on “Best of 2015″ lists by The New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A Spanish edition, Los Usos Del Cuerpo, was published by Valparaiso Ediciones in 2017. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, The Best American Poetry, and the New York Times. She teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your latest book, Soft Targets, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
Deborah Landau: The book comprises linked lyric sequences — my favorite form.
2) I’ve always written about the vulnerabilities of the body, but in this book the fear of annihilation extends beyond the self to an imperiled planet on which we’re all soft targets, and there are so many threats: the threat of gun violence, of global terror, of climate change, the threats to our democracy, and so on. It’s very hard to figure out how to protect the cherished “little world”—family, friends, children—when the world at large feels increasingly menacing. The poems in the book constellate in that space.
It’s a grim book but it has a beautiful cover. Thanks to CCP designer Phil Kovacevich for the shimmery silver foil and and french flaps!
KMD: You also serve as Director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. How does nurturing and championing other writers feed your own creative practice? How has your academic community shaped this particular collection?
DL: I love working with our extraordinarily gifted students and they continually amaze me. I’m always learning so much from them about what is possible in poems. Our community is diverse and vibrant and alive, and it’s truly energizing to be part of it. I see my work —reading poems, writing poems, teaching poems, and directing NYU’s writing programs—as all of a piece. Each part of my life supports and energizes the others. I’m really fortunate that way.
KMD: NYU is renowned for its international learning opportunities, with a Paris Writing Program and educational centers in Italy, the UK, Spain, and just about everywhere else on the globe. In your estimation, how does the experience of travel, cultural exchange, and linguistic otherness manifest in Soft Targets?
DL: The first section of the book was written in Paris during (and after) the string of terror attacks there. We were there (with NYU’s low residency MFA Program in Paris) during the Charlie Hebdo attack and aftermath, and again just after the attacks of November 2015, and then again when the Nice attack happened. It was an incredibly scary and chaotic time–and the poems came out that feeling of a world gone mad. The tenor of the city has changed. When I’m in Paris I stay in the Marais across the street from an old synagogue. For many years there were abundant weddings and celebrations outside my window on an almost daily basis (my third book, The Uses of the Body, begins with a sequence of those weddings); now, more often there are soldiers stationed there with their enormous guns. It’s hard to integrate. Soft Targets registers the struggle to make sense of the contrast. The poems are a way to press back against what feels like an increasingly violent reality.
KMD: As Director of the Writing Program at NYU, you’ve witnessed many artistic careers unfold before you. What advice do you have for writers who are just beginning to publish in magazines? Or, for writers who are just beginning to submit their book manuscripts to publishers and contests?
DL: Read as much as you can, write as much as you can. Keep your head down and do your work. Share your writing with trusted readers and don’t rush to publish. It’s better to take your time and send the work out when it’s truly ready. Also, I think it’s important to find satisfaction in the writing of poems as an end in itself—as a kind of deep and sustaining expressive pleasure. A singular focus on contests, publication, and prizes becomes an endless trap and distraction.
KMD: What has surprised you most as you’ve witnessed so many writerly careers from start to finish?
DL: The extraordinary range of talent and creative life that abounds in our community. It’s beautiful to see our students enter the program with so much potential and energy, and then to see their seriousness and ambition for the work, and then to see their books populating the world. The books of our alumni now sit beside the books of the acclaimed faculty who taught them. It’s wonderful to walk into a book store and see so many friends there, side by side.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can readers look forward to?
DL: This interview! I hope you like it.