Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of eighteen books, including Not All Saints, winner of the 2019 Bitter Oleander Library of Poetry Prize. His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018) received both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Housatonic Book Award from Western Connecticut State University. More info on Sean can be found at seanthomasdoughertypoet.com. His poem “Something About Failure” can be found here. It appears along with another poem in the Sept/Oct 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Something About Failure”?
I had taken a workshop with my friend Adrian Matejka the summer before where he had us write a poem about driving somewhere. I think the seeds of this poem began there, because after that workshop I wrote a series of poems with driving in them. I commute nearly a half hour for work and am always driving somewhere, from and to hospitals due to long term family illness or my work. Driving to the store, we are always driving aren’t we, us Americans in the small places without public transit. I don’t know, the seed of the poem might be there. But it began more directly with the title, I was writing a series of notes for myself and that fragment started the poem. I remember I typed Something About Failure (I often begin writing my poems with a title, and then letting that be a key for the poem) but then I was interrupted by one of my daughters who is autistic and was having a bad night, and I left writing for a while. When I returned, I had no idea what my idea was, so I started the poem just how it reads about not remembering and then just let the actual physical unfolding of the present tense take me and the poem somewhere.
Can you talk about the tradition of writing big, unanswerable questions? I’m struck by the way you describe “a thousand failings, a wrong word said . . . what is one to do?” and “The factory closes, we get sick / & are laid off. Who is to blame?” Do you write poems to address these questions, or are you inspired by other poets who do?
I do this a lot in my poems because I am often pondering big questions in my poems. My life itself deals so much with the dead or the ill, the disability, with issues of addictions, with those of us who live both outside and in the seen world, and in those worlds which exist right beside the so called normal. I think those questions are not unanswerable in the poem. They are answered by the reader, in probably specific ways. To leave the question unanswered is to give space to the reader to enter the poem. The poem becomes dialogic. In many ways I think the poems I enjoy more are a sort of question, the author’s puzzlement of the world, of existing, of the nature of oppression, of one’s own skin. I have never trusted the dictum in poetry “to tell one’s own story.” I suspect the lyric impulse in poetry is more perhaps to ask “what is my story” over and over, and in the act of writing our poem we reaffirm our existence and human right to speak, to be, to sing, without ever really getting to the answer, or at least not the right answer. Poetry is probably the act of giving the wrong answer. That is why it always feels so dangerous to the secret police.
Why did you choose to end with the promise of fall?
I never choose anything in poetry. I don’t write poems as much as listen to them. I don’t mean that mystical idea of muse or even duende, though there have been many years I believed in that. I mean to the language that falls as it falls onto the page. Once a word leaves the fourth dimension of our bodies, which inside is a place that can transcend time and space, and enters the three and two dimensional reality of where we live, where language becomes a series of sounds, heard and seen, the act of the poem becomes listening to those sounds in real time. This is perhaps the same way someone who makes music I suspect hears a series of notes that then limit or offer a series of equations of sound that then can unfold toward somewhere. Though the choices of what happens after each sentence feel infinite, they are far from it. The pressure of vowels and consonants in the preceding words and their myriad histories of sound and meaning dictate what is to follow. In many ways if one is listening where a poem ends up should feel inevitable, even if when it ends it still feels open. It is not choice that makes the poem liberating, but diving into the wreck, as Adrienne Rich, has written. We follow the map, the current, we dive down deep. Her poem about women and liberation is also a poem about the liberating nature of the poem and the politics of the body. We are our bodies and more than our bodies. We must have our own myths to be more than myth. We end the poem; we step back out of the time space of the poem but yet we should have taken something of it with us. The same way I suspect after we die, we step out of the river with the resemblance of a life we lived here, yet wholly different.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing for the first thirty years. I still probably don’t, but I think I am finally learning to listen closely to the poem, listen closer to the world. I stopped worrying about failure. Everything we do is failure. As soon as we take our first breath we start to fail. Our first breath is the first step to death. It passes all so fast. I think maybe over decades I’ve learned to listen to slow down time and to tune into language more, to the music that makes us, the music that breaks us open, into bullets or blossoms, that helps us to become. To understand that how we live is not linear. There is no great progression towards something except our inevitable demise. That is the only truth if anything is true but that our bodies exist is a specific time and place. Perhaps the rest is what we make? Through music and through memory, every day we live is not in a straight line. And so sometimes I’ve given pause within myself to believe, or is it praise? That either or neither is the poem.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
I try to avoid superlative words when it comes to poetry, as everything in the life does not influence but is a part of the writing. Was it Philip Levine who wrote there are two kinds of poems, the poems you read that start with something walking down the street and noticing something, and the poems that begin with someone reading something in a book. He was perhaps getting at a binary between poems that deal with the lived life versus a more academic (Grecian Urn) kind of poetry. But the older I get I find that binary a bit facetious as everything we read and live is part of the poem. My work as a caregiver and MedTech has become a profound part of my poetry and my reflection and understanding of life, of being alive, of what it is to be a person. I currently work with people with brain injuries whose sense of self is compromised. I become a link for them to time and space. Imagine waking up and what you see is not what is there and not being able to see or hear time and space? And yet we have our bodies to give us clues, to feel the weight and lightness of gravity. That is what antifoundational ideas of everything we know is language fail, because it doesn’t consider our bodied knowledge. Our bodies themselves as the point for every kind of liberatory and oppressive response to the world. Entire peoples and genders are subjugated for no other reason than their bodies. Yet, it is the knowledge our bodies hold down to our DNA where the poem exists. I have always believed that the act of poems and art is biological as well as cultural. There is no people on earth that does not have poetry.
Our bodies are poems. Our voices are poems. The sound of our children laughing is a poem. The wind is a poem that weaves its way through what seems invisible and touches us like a mother to a fevered head or pushes us down to teach us to stand again. And we do. For we are people. We rise, we fail, we fall, and yet we eventually are the wind itself. As Buenaventura Durruti wrote, we have long lived in ruins, we will rebuild this world. The poem is a voice. One day I believe there will be a new national anthem, not one of war and bombs bursting in air, but one that says something like
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
But it will not be our names written in the book. We will be the book. We are the book. Open it. Read us.