It has been a busy National Poetry Month for Daniel Lusk, but it’s not over yet. Lusk will help bring PoemCity 2014 to a close with a in Montpelier. We spoke to Lusk about the collection that publisher Lin Stone found “haunted by images of wild and beautiful characters.”
THE DOORYARD: Much of the work in KIN was previously published in national journals. How do you know when a piece can stand alone, and when it belongs with a collection of thematically similar works such as those in KIN?
DANIEL LUSK: I tend to identify a project in advance and then as I go about the process of writing a series of poems, nearly all will be generated with that eventual collection in mind. While either writing the poems or circulating the mss., until a collection is published, I continue to submit individual poems to journals. Publication of the poems in journals broadens the potential audience for my poems but also can lend credibility to a book when it comes out.
THE DOORYARD: Your resume includes a previous career as a jazz singer. Poetry and jazz seem analogous in that they require an almost visceral understanding of their respective languages, and you?ve spoken of the influence of jazz on your writing. Is the relationship for you between music and poetry an impressionistic one, or is there a literal musical phrasing that you hear when writing?
DANIEL LUSK: My early poetic influences included both scripture (the King James Bible before I knew any Shakespeare) and classical music (both opera and orchestral music). I was a pre-seminary student in college and studied and later taught voice while performing in musicals and later jazz standards in clubs. Once I began to read and write poetry (my first models were Wordsworth, T.S.Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke), I wanted to learn to write poems that would sing themselves off the page. Whose lines and phrasing was lyrical but that were filled with imagery. It meant needing to learn the basic elements of craft (not formal craft, but the sort of craft found in more recent masters like Robert Bly, Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, Susan Stewart’s first book and more recently Sandra Alcosser and Barbara Ras).
THE DOORYARD: You’ve done a number of public performances of your poetry ? is your poetry written for the page, or for an oral presentation? Do you find that your work evolves upon performing it?
DANIEL LUSK: I’ve been doing public readings since the late 1960s. My poems are written to be enjoyed both by being heard and by being read to one’s self–hopefully the lyrical quality is present for people either way. As for whether it evolves–not that I’m aware of. Though the years I spent singing in clubs with a microphone helped me to learn how the microphone can become an instrument for a poet, especially when reading meditative sorts of poems like mine tend to be.
THE DOORYARD: You are, of course, married to another of Vermont’s leading poets, Angela Patten. How does your personal dynamic play in your professional life? Do you turn to one another for advice, for criticism, or for ideas, or prefer to leave one another’s works alone?
DANIEL LUSK: Angela and I are very supportive of each other, both in the way we respect each other’s writing time and the way we appreciate our very different subject matter and styles of writing. She writes poetry I would not be able to write. Her gifts for remembering what and how people talk, turns of phrase, and her insights into relationships that seem almost foreign to me. We both celebrate when one of us has a poem published somewhere. We do not offer criticism unless invited.
THE DOORYARD: Your latest collection, KIN, is notably inspired by Vermont’s wildlife. I wonder if the present changing of seasons has confirmed or challenged any of the assertions in the collection?
DANIEL LUSK: Besides responding to encounters with animals and birds, KIN is also filled with allusions to the sorts of things I happened to be reading during the decade that I wrote the poems–especially fairytales and folklore, but also books that taught me about Vermont wildlife and the environment I was learning to husband and share with them. The present change of seasons reflects the poems well–I was fascinated by mud season most of all, and my impulse was to want to mythify it.
DANIEL LUSK: Two things: I’m working with editors at Wind Ridge Book of Vermont to complete a memoir about how I grew from early religious influences to be the sort of poet who lives far from where I began yet whose poems echo the spirit and language that is my literary inheritance. And I’m working on a suite of poems based on the paintings of the Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer. My previous collections (Lake Studies and an unpublished collection about art) showed me how research can provide both fuel and fodder for poetry if one is disciplined as well as imaginative.