Dobby Gibson Reads Diane Seuss
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Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we invite a poet to pick a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss. Then, they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine. Today, my guest is Dobby Gibson, who's the author of five poetry collections, including most recently, Hold Everything. He's also the recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Dobby, welcome. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Kevin. Glad to be here.

So the first poem you've chosen to read is I Have Slept in Many Places for Years on Mattresses That Entered by Diane Seuss. Tell us, what was it about this poem that caught your attention when you were looking through the archive? Well, for me, any Diane Seuss poem is an event that

that I get very excited about. This particular poem comes from her book, Frank Sonnets, which won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago, and for me is just one of the most exciting books of poems of the past couple decades. So it was a super quick choice, and I'm excited to talk about it with you. Well, why don't we hear the poem? This is Dobby Gibson reading, I have slept in many places for years on mattresses that entered by Diane Seuss.

I have slept in many places for years on mattresses that entered. I have slept in many places for years on mattresses that entered my life via nothing but luck. As a child on wet sheets, I could not contain myself. As a teen on the bed where my father ate his last pomegranate, among crickets and chicken bones in ditches, in the bare grass on the lavish grounds of a crumbling castle,

in a flapping german circus tent in a lean-to my head on the belly of a sick calf in a terrible darkness where a shrew tried to stay afloat in a bucket of well water

In a blue belfry, on a pink couch being eaten from the inside by field mice, on bare floorboards by TV light with nickel on Locust Place, on an amber throne of cockroach casings, on a carpet of needles from a cemetery pine, in a clubhouse circled by crabapple trees with high school boys who are now members of a megachurch.

in a hotel bathtub in St. Augustine after a sip from the fountain of youth, cold on a cliff's edge, passed out cold on train tracks, in a hospital bed, holding my lamb like an army of lilacs.

That was I Have Slept in Many Places for Years on Mattresses That Entered by Diane Seuss, which was published in the September 14th, 2020 issue of The New Yorker. I loved hearing you read that poem, and I'm so glad you told us before that it was a sonnet. This poem, I think, has this great roundness. What makes it for you a sonnet besides it being 14 lines?

Well, there is that internal rhyme that Diane uses so effectively. So this doesn't have the chiming rhyme of a Shakespearean sonnet, but it's all held together by her sonnets. And then also, of course, the anaphora and the listing of all these different places that she slept. And I think in that way, this poem is such a great encapsulation of Frank Sonnet's The Book. I mean, here she's telling us her life story, right?

in a single sonnet just by listing all these amazing, outrageous places that she slept in the course of her amazing life. Do you take it literally then? I mean, I take it as kind of using that world a sonnet can create, which is a world of desire, experience, loss, yearning. There's something about it that...

It's kind of perfect for history, but also not interested in history qua history. You know, it's not a history that you find in a book. Instead, it's the history of a feeling. For sure. And it was making me think, like, can you imagine playing two lies and a truth or whatever that game is with Diane Seuss? Like, you would never win because...

The truth is fantastic as her imagination is. That's right. My head on the belly of a sick calf in a terrible darkness where a shoe tried to stay afloat in a bucket of well water. There's that kind of

Almost fairytale quality, but maybe Alice in Wonderland is more accurate, like that kind of terrible, terrifying quality that gets into Lewis Carroll or something like that here. I'm so glad you brought that up. I was thinking of fairytales too. And of course, we're talking about the fairytales before Disney got hold of them.

the real fairy tales, the original fairy tales, which are terrifying and strange. And I'm seeing that here too. Yeah. When people say, we had a fairy tale wedding, I'm like, ugh, like someone lost a foot? You know, like this is terrible. Exactly. Exactly. For me, when does it happen that we know we're not only in the realm of experience? Though I think what's powerful about it is it evokes experience. And

you know, I'll say it again, for me, a good poem, you know, evokes rather than describes. You know, it is an event. As Robert Lowell says, it's not just the record of an event. And there's something about that moment when it says...

"My life via nothing but luck. As a child on wet sheets, I could not contain myself." And then in a way, the poem can't contain itself. We have the feeling that if it wasn't a sonnet, it would keep going because there's this kind of rolling accumulation that happens in the poem. Yeah, "Mattresses that entered my life via nothing but luck." That's magical right there. And so then we are kind of in this other realm. Well, and something about this specificity as well,

On bare floorboards by TV light with Mikel on Locus Place. Okay. You know, by then you could take me anywhere. Yeah. I mean, I'm with you. And I think there's something about that eye as a kind of guide that starts but then is not there but is in every moment and choice. You know, we're seeing a self-discovery.

That is, in a way, even though it's describing precarity in some senses, is also describing wonder and this kind of generosity in a way, just by embracing everything. Yeah, and the stuff of a Diane Seuss poem. In here we have crickets, we have chicken bones. At the end of this poem you feel like you're picking leaves and acorns out of your hair. You feel like you've really been somewhere extraordinary before.

It's so lush with these sort of details. Well, how do you create a sort of whole world in a sonnet? Is that the sonnet's job usually, or is that just when it's done right? That's such a good question.

I mean, in the case of this poem, I think so much of the world is the voice. It's so compelling and you trust it. This book is called Frank Sonnets, partly as an homage to Frank O'Hara, who appears in other poems within this collection, but also quite literally Diane Seuss's being Frank here. And so there is just that really direct, very intimate voice that pulls us into this poem and just holds it together throughout.

Is it a kind of American voice, you think? How do you characterize it? I think so. It's not entirely vernacular because it is sort of extraordinary in both its details and in its sonics. But she is also renowned as a poet for just being very blunt and being a poet of the body. And so there isn't a politeness to the poem. It's direct. I mean, the other connection I made with this poem was

spending time with it is the Canterbury Tales. I mean, we have here a traveler who's telling us their amazing story through this conceit of all the different places they've slept. So that also, I think, makes it feel kind of ancient or connected to poetry in a broader tradition. Well, and even every line or phrase separated by a comma is a kind of novel.

in a clubhouse circled by crabapple trees with high school boys who are now members of a megachurch. And just as we're catching up to that, we're in St. Augustine in the Fountain of Youth, you know. And we should mention, this is all one sentence. So it's all just one utterance, which just, it just really kind of hurdles us through the poem, I think. It's interesting because I think the long lines in the whole book do something powerful, but also I think something different line to line.

which isn't easy, you know, when you're cataloging or listing or repeating, you almost start to have a temptation to have it be even. But Diane, I think here really shows us the way that variety,

leads to the music or maybe it's the music leads to the variety and you know if all the phrases were the same it wouldn't have that same feeling there's something musical about it and of course that's the sonnet for you it's you know a little song i love that quality that is throughout the poem and you know sonnets also are traditionally love poems do you think of this as a love poem

I think so. And I think throughout the book, there's love for Mikkel, who's a character, a friend of hers who's important to the book, and even Frank O'Hara to a degree. And of course, her father, the death of her father when she was seven is one of the great subjects of her poetry in this book and other books. So I think there is a love song component to it.

But with Diane Seuss, there's always multiple things going on at once. And for that reason, you know, the sonnet is never boring in her hands. And in this book, it's extraordinary to see, you know, she stretches the sonnet out and some of them are shaggier and some of them are tighter and have tighter rhymes and

Just being a fan of hers, I know she's talked of the importance of Wanda Coleman and Gerald Stern and other practitioners of the so-called American sonnet that helped to give her permission to do what she does in this poem and the larger book, Frank's Sonnets.

It's one of the weeks I miss teaching, which was American sonnets, which I'm glad it's now a term. I think when I started writing about it, I was thinking of Wanda Coleman, of course, or Berryman or Ted Berrigan, who all had this tradition that they kind of each made separately, sometimes around the same time. But then, you know, now we look back and see the ways that the sonnet mid-century and after really changed to me.

And, you know, this is one of the great ones and one of the great series. You know, I love a good series. And as you suggest, you tell these stories over time. You know, the sonnets, in a way, is the first novel. It's the first big, long narrative beyond the epic that's sort of broken up in these little bits that you assemble something out of, right? I love that. Anyway, enough on my lecture on the American sonnet. I want to ask about the father line. As a teen on the bed,

where my father ate his last break pomegranate. And then we get among crickets and chicken bones in ditches in the bare break grass on the lavish grounds of a crumbling castle. And there's a way that, you know, there's the childhood of,

But as you point out, this loss that looms large on the page, you know, just going for the last word of the last four lines, entered, not, last, bear. There's loss there. There is in that sharp assonance with crickets, chicken bones, ditches, and then we get the consonants crumbling castle.

And yeah, that image of her father eating his last pomegranate seems straight out of a really spooky fairy tale. Well, it's myth, right? It's forbidden fruit, but it's also the fruit of the underworld that keeps you there. And there's something really haunting, simple, beautiful about that. And the echo for me is in that last line, in a hospital bed, holding my lamb like an army of lilacs.

How do you hear that, and how do you read that? There's a little bit of a pieta kind of posture to this poem of Diane. She's clutching the lamb, but she's also clutching the memory of her father. So I'm feeling that quite viscerally in this poem and thinking about it throughout the broader book, for sure, of course. Does that make sense? Do you see that too? Yes. I mean, I like what you said. If I'm quiet, it's because I'm trying to think about...

All the things it is. And that's, I think, really smart and spot on. I also think there's something about the sounds, you know, hospital, holding, lamb, like an army of lilacs, you know. And the strangeness of being a body and of loss and all those things sort of come to bear. It's like a strange thing, like another strange thing.

And I love that. It feels like exactly right. It couldn't have been said a different way. But at least I couldn't have gotten there, you know. And I think the poem has all the visceral things and then it has this moment which both is visceral and I think blooming constantly. And there's something about it that every time I look at it, it shifts. Holding my lamb, it's like holding it tight, you know, wanting it to survive. But then it's also this

army of lilacs, which is a kind of contradiction, but also a kind of marshalling of forces. It seems to me this moment of real reckoning. Yeah, and it's such an arresting last image. And, you know, no one ever talks about poems as page turners, but Frank Sonnets is a book where it's just irresistible to keep going when these sonnets end, as they all do throughout this book, and these

amazing ways. It just makes you so hungry to find out what happens next in her life. And she's moving backward and forward in time, and it's unlike any other book of poems I can remember reading. More from my conversation with Abbie Gibson after the break. ...

Or Joy Williams.

Her father was silent. Slowly, he passed his hand over his hair. This usually meant that he was traveling to a place immune to her presence, a place that indeed contradicted her presence. She might as well go to lunch. Listen to new stories or dive into our archive of great fiction. You can find the work of your favorite fiction writers and discover new ones. Listen and follow The Writer's Voice wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, in our August 5th, 2024 issue, The New Yorker published your poem, This is a Test of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Wireless Warning System, which you'll read for us in a moment. Did you want to say anything about the poem before we hear it? No, I think we can just go for it. Here's Dobby Gibson reading his poem, This is a Test of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Wireless Warning System.

This is a test of the Federal Emergency Management Agency wireless warning system. We've all walked into the bar of a joke we'll never get. Knock knock from the evangelicals inviting you to pancakes. Knock knock from democracy looking for its key fob. Don't open the door if the knob feels warm. When all goes quiet, you'll know the wolves have you right where they want you. Some days, more than anything, I want my old bike back.

Some nights I switch on the porch light to watch the bugs. It's nice to have something bright and buzzing to gather around. Hasn't the goal all along been to make an unforgettable sound? For Beethoven, the ringing in his ears never stopped. For Miles, there was no wrong note. Only what comes next, and it's hard not to fear what comes next. One summer, the emergency is the butterflies vanish. The next, it's nothing but smoke.

What's really scary are miniature horses, pink ribbons in their tails, prancing around the fair while everyone conceals and carries and cotton candy fills the air. A fortune lurks at the center of every grapefruit. There's a howl coming from inside the glacier. An old car backfires, then the sky is full of crows.

That was, This is a Test of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Wireless Warning System by Dobby Gibson. So did the title come first here? When did that title come? So the story with this poem is I was at work. I have an office job. This was October 4th of 2023.

when FEMA sent out this test signal to all of our electronic devices. And so because I was in this open workspace with a bunch of knowledge workers who all had two or three devices per person, it was just a cacophony of this horrible sound. And I couldn't stop thinking about it the rest of the day. And I just wondered,

You know, basically, if I wrote a libretto for that horrible sound, what might that sound like? And that was the genesis of the poem, and then I was off and running. Was this idea in the middle? Hasn't the goal all along been to make an unforgettable sound? It feels like, to me, like the kind of fulcrum of the poem. You know, there's a before, and then there's a kind of after, which is trying to talk about sound in a different way from some days more than anything. I want my old bike back.

I think that's really perceptive. I mean, that's a statement of poetics in and of itself. And that's really the transformation I was trying. Can I make something that's just the most horrible thing in the world into something that's interesting or beautiful and kind of like Orpheus singing so beautifully, he drowns out the sirens. I guess it kind of goes back to that sort of idea as arrogant or wild as that might sound. Well, I think there's also this quality of

dark humor in the beginning of the poem. Some nights I switch on the porch light to watch the bugs. It's nice to have something bright and buzzing to gather around. And then you have this rhyme of around and hasn't the goal all along been to make an unforgettable sound. And then we start to notice if we haven't already those pickups of rhyme, which I know you're aware of, fob, knob, you know, these ways that you're playing with language.

Yeah. How do you marshal those? Are those something that come for you? You know, for me, it's more like later I realize, oh, man, I was doing some internal rhyme in there. You know, is it a music that you're hearing or is it a music you're trying for? Or is that not the right question?

No, it's a good question. It's much more the latter for me, where the music becomes part of the act of composition. And the less conscious I am of it, the better, because it's an engine and it's a force for helping me to make these associations. Because that's the other thing I think this poem is doing, or the logic of it, is just this kind of wild associative energy. Well, how do you think about humor in a poem? I mean, you start with a joke, or the joke will never get.

Is that poetry? Or is it like a cosmic joke? How do you think about humor in poetry, which I know is something you've used? Yeah. I mean, I don't like the idea that poems should be solemn or be well-behaved. And I think humor is such an effective tool to get people to pay attention and

to get myself to pay attention and even be interested. And I'm glad you're picking up on this. This has been a really fun poem to read out loud. I was hearing the crowd, you know, chuckle or maybe guffaw. Yeah. How aware are you of that? Like how people are going to hear it? This is a poem about sound after all. Is there some of that in your writing or, you know, certainly your reading?

I think so. And I mean, any poem I'm working on is, I think any respectable poet will do. I'll read it out loud to try and hear how it sounds just in a room and to hear whether the rhymes and the other assonance consonants, other effects that I'm trying to add to the poem or have become integral to the poem in composition are effective. So amazing to me how we all approach it differently and how after a while you hear it without hearing it, you know?

Hearing you read it changes it, of course. But there's a music that's just waiting for us. And I love that. And however you get there, we love. Do you read your poems out loud? Way later than I would have thought. My theory of them is that they have a sound. And sometimes they sound different in my head, of course. And it's the music in the head I think sometimes you're trying to capture. So what about these miniature horses? Yeah.

Tell me about the terrifying miniature horses. And is that sort of the banality of evil? You know, how do you think of it now, looking at it and hearing it aloud? I didn't want this poem to just be a litany. I wanted it to be...

strange and I wanted it to get at the really peculiar texture of our current moment where it's not just the big things that are scary although they are awfully scary right now but that makes just like you're saying the most banal thing also seem terrifying and so it just takes on new levels and new resonances well and I think there the miniature horse is prancing while everyone conceals and carries and cotton candy fills the air and

and the rhyme of fear and error, it allows this moment of not just strangeness, but kind of deep mystery.

the glacier, the grapefruit, the howl, the crows. You're not trying to wrap it up, in my opinion. You know, you're trying to leave us in that unsettled place, and that's not easy. I mean, it could have ended with these miniature horses and be only commentary, and I feel like what it does is

is leave us in this place of mystery and menace. And that startling feeling that I think captures, you know, the origins of the poem as you've put it in this actual warning, but is a different kind of warning too.

And that's kind of the uncomfortable tension at the heart of the poem. We have the technology to deliver this alert to everybody's mobile device, but we can't even know where all the threats are coming from. And we can't find the device sometimes. It's just loudly in the other room or in a pocket we can't access. That's right. How do we kind of think about that? I was wondering too about the book this comes from, Hold Everything.

How do you think about that title? And I guess maybe the book as a whole, were you writing in sequence, thinking of the sonnets we were talking about with Diane, Zeus? How does the book and the poem, how do they relate to each other for you? Yeah, so the title Hold Everything refers to both this idea of there's urgent news that I'm bringing or the poems are bringing, and certainly this poem is a demonstration of that. There are also poems in the book that

Allude to that other reading of hold everything where they're doing kind of a more tender accounting for lack of a better phrase, just asking you to to pay attention. My wife works in retail environments and once a year.

They perform inventory. So they lock the front door of the establishment and they count everything that's in there. And I've always felt like, well, that makes a lot of sense to me. And so there's a little bit of that going on in the book too. It's an inventory of our modern moment. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and just my own gratitude. There's a lot of gratitude in the other poems that are in the collection. And there is a sonnet sequence in the collection that, as I acknowledge at the end of the book, owes a debt to Diane Seuss for sure.

And for you, how do you approach the sonnet? One of my favorite forms. I mean, I'm always trying to smuggle in sonnets, you know, into books. And for me, there were times I thought, okay, this is going to be a sonnet sequence. And then there were times when I look back and I think, wait, I'm writing poems that are 13 lines, 15 lines, 14 lines almost accidentally. And, oh, I better look toward what the form is trying to tell me.

That is exactly what happened to me. I came into the forum quite accidentally, but at the same time, I was really inspired by Diane Seuss using the sonnet as a means of writing a memoir, Terrence Hayes using the sonnet as a site of protest. But for me, I was interested in using the sonnet as a meditative engine and could I track the texture of time on a moment by moment basis

Whether I pulled it off or not, readers will have to decide. But that was what was really driving me. And you said you work an office job. Is that right? I do. When do you write? I hate this question, by the way. That's why I'm asking you. So when do you write? I have to get up before everyone else does and try and put in some work before I go off to work. And then the weekends are also really good writing time for me. I love that you said put in work before work because...

That's what it feels like, I think, especially if you're in the groove, let's call it, and you're working. And, you know, for me, a regular time doesn't always appear. But when I'm in the habit of writing and finding that time, it can be really magical and transporting. And then all day you're sort of on and buzzing and recording, as it were, and then you're getting it down or getting it out. I'm not sure which it is.

Yeah, as poets, we're just makers. And if I can wake up and make something every day, then it's a great day. And not everything's going to work out or be usable in the end, but it's doing the work that brings me so much pleasure. And do you like having something totally different than the poetry?

I do. I came to poetry late and by accident. And so it feels covert a little bit and it feels more charged and like my own private territory, at least in the composition stage before it becomes time to talk to Kevin Young on the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. And when you say late, tell us what that means for you.

Yeah, so I was a fiction student in an MFA program at Indiana University. And that was the first time in my life that I was around other living poets. And they started to hand me books of poems. You came over to the dark side, the right side. That's lovely. They were handing me contraband. Spuggling slim volumes to you.

Is there anything else we need to know about how you're thinking about poetry these days? Because I think it's a really important moment. I'm seeing poets really trying to do some of what you're doing here, which is how do you talk about it?

You know, how do you talk about this moment or that moment or our lives or modern life or however you want to define the big space? How do you talk about it? And I love how you found a way, but I'm curious if you think about it and stand back and see it in that way.

I think about it all the time. There are tremendous forces trying to divide us, trying to get us to think with absolute certitude about the world. And I just come to poetry so grateful to have a space for negative capability, for confusion, testing out ideas. It just feels more vital to me now than it ever has. Beautifully put.

Well, thank you so much for talking with me today, Dabi. It's been a real pleasure. I've loved it. Thanks, Kevin. This is a test of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Wireless Warning System by Dabi Gibson, as well as Diane Seuss's I Have Slept in Many Places for Years on Mattresses That Entered, can be found on newyorker.com. Diane Seuss's most recent book is Modern Poetry. Dabi Gibson's latest collection is Hold Everything.

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