Road Trip: Dorianne Laux

In 2010, Ali Liebegott took a road trip by train. Destination: the Emily Dickinson house. Along the way, she interviewed poets—Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, CAConrad, and many more. We’ll be reposting the series to celebrate the release of Liebegott’s fourth book, The Summer of Dead Birds.

I discovered Dorianne Laux’s poetry shortly after I moved to San Francisco in 1991 to be a poet myself. I was twenty supporting myself as a waitress and went to a reading she was doing with Kim Addonizio. I was immediately drawn in by her poems depicting the working class. Laux was reading from her very first book, Awake. I interviewed her in her home in Raleigh, North Carolina in October of 2010 where she lives with her husband, the poet Joe Millar. This is an excerpt from our interview.

—Ali Liebegott

THE BELIEVER: Do you remember the first Emily Dickinson poem you ever read?

DORIANNE LAUX: I’m sure one of the first was the carriage, death is like a… I can’t remember how old I was. It could have been as late as when I went to Mills College. And I didn’t like her. I always thought, Well this is too easy. It’s like a kid’s poem. Or conversely, This is too hard. I can’t figure this out. And then I was at the University of Oregon ten years ago now, and I had been made head of the program—and don’t ever become head of any kind of program—and I was completely isolated. I had this huge office. The phone was constantly ringing. I had to write memos. And I could not get back to my poetry. One day I was in my office eating my little sack lunch, feeling like a business woman dressed up in my fucking mauve blouse, trying to be cool, and I just started crying. I thought, Where am I? Why am I here? I hate this. I want to be a waitress again. I’ve lost my poetry. I’m not writing. I’m not reading. All I’m doing is dealing with bullshit. So I went on the Poetry Daily website thinking maybe I’ll just read a poem. That’ll make me feel better. And on that particular day they had an Emily Dickinson poem. I opened it up and read,

There is a pain—so utter—

It swallows substance up—

and I just collapsed. I said, “Emily, thank you. You know my pain, honey.” I was also going through a tough time. There had been a couple deaths. I suddenly got how soulful she was and how she could get such passion and longing and feeling into so few...