BONUS MICRO-EPISODE: Dorianne Laux is at your service

Some of America’s most celebrated poets are standing by to write poems for you on commission. Together, they form The International Bureau of Custom Poetry. More about the Bureau here.

In this special introductory episode, Bureau agent Dorianne Laux recounts her path from gas station attendant to Pulitzer Prize finalist, including a cameo of her mother at the sewing machine in Dorianne’s poem, “Singer.”

Do you have a loved one you’d like memorialized in a poem? Or a precious memory you’d like preserved for the ages? Dorianne Laux and the other professional poets in the Bureau are standing by to work with you. Sessions can be private or taped for potential use on TAPIT. Visit our website to enquire. Or call our listener line at 808-300-0449.

Transcript

Dorianne  0:00 
My name is Dorianne Laux, and I'm a poet.

Todd  0:04 
April is National Poetry Month. So you didn't really think we'd stick to our normal routine, did you?

Dorianne  0:12 
I have a new book out called Life on Earth, of poems. And I also have another book out called Finger Exercises for Poets, which I think is self explanatory.

Todd  0:28 
Todd Boss here, host of There's a Poem in That, with a special micro-episode designed to introduce you to a great American poet who is standing by to write for you. That's right. We're only in our second season, but TAPIT has begun to turn heads in the literary world by demonstrating the unique rewards poets can experience when they work one-on-one with strangers. More and more poets are coming forward wanting to do this work. Together, they're forming what I'm calling the International Bureau of Custom Poetry, a commissioning agency that puts some of the world's best poets at your service for a fee. In the coming months, I'll introduce them to you briefly, one at a time, and invite them to reflect on why they've signed up to write poems just for you. In this episode, Pulitzer finalist, Dorianne Laux. I met you back in Key West. (That's right.) through a literary seminar. Yeah, and you were so kind to meet with me and have breakfast and chat. And I'll never forget, that was just a very kind thing for you to do.

Dorianne  1:34 
Well, I have to eat.

You probably paid for it, right?

Todd  1:40 
Yeah, sure.

Dorianne  1:41 
Who says there isn't a free meal? You know?

Todd  1:44 
Yeah, you owe me now. See? So that's what you're doing here.

Dorianne  1:48 
Yeah, yeah.

Dori, you grew up working class, right?

Well, you know, my stepfather was in the Navy. My father lived in Maine and worked in a paper factory. And we lived in a little neighborhood, in San Diego on a cul de sac, back in the day, when housing was pretty cheap. You know, we made our own clothes; it was lots of, you know, cheap cuts of meat and stuff like that. But it wasn't a bad life. And there was a little gas station down on the main boulevard going towards the ocean. And it was called Fast Gas. I worked there and I and it was back in the days when you actually went out and pumped their gas and checked their oil and their tires. And I could even change spark plugs. And then one night, they left me a note saying, will you please vacuum the tire shop next door? And I wrote him a note and said, "No, I quit." And so I quit. And then they called me the next day and said, "Oh, please don't quit. We love you. We want.." you know, I said, "Well, I'm not vacuuming no tire store. You don't pay me enough." And they go, "Well, how about if we gave you your own gas station, and you can be the manager, and we'll give you a salary? And so we'll up your pay, you know, by X amount?" And I said, "Well, I'll think about it." I mean, my God, I was a cheeky child. And so then I thought, well, that's a pretty good deal. So I also said, "Well, I want to do it. But if I'm going to do it, I have to be able to hire all my friends." And they said, "Okay." And so I had my long haired, hippie, Jewish boyfriend and my girlfriend, who is half crazy, my sister, who was fully crazy, and just got them all jobs at the gas station.

Todd  3:47 
Wow, wow.

Dorianne  3:49 
It was great. 

Todd  3:50 
And then when did you decide to go to school?

Dorianne  3:51 
I, I was always writing poems. And I really liked writing poems. And so I decided that I would go back to when he called Community College and see if they had poetry classes, which they did; they had one. So I joined. It was a night class. And by then, I had my daughter. She was already two years old. So I must have been, I don't know, 24...20...you know, somewhere in there. And I'd go at night. My girlfriend would watch my daughter. And a teacher named Steve Cowett was teaching there. And he really encouraged me and said, you know, you should do a poetry reading. Come do one with me at D G Wills bookstore in San Diego. And that was sort of the beginning, you know, and then I'd publish in their little magazine and went to these little workshops. And it was it was great. And it was my introduction to that whole life.

Todd  4:49 
Tell me a little bit about how your poetry has changed over the years and whether you see a future change ahead for your poetry.

Dorianne  4:58 
You know, my first book was really about, pretty much, myself, you know, as all first books are, although the last poem starts to look more outward, and then it just keeps enlarging from there in terms of looking outside of myself into the world and what my place in it is, and asking all those questions, you know, and then the new and selected was really kind of, you know, I'll...I had written all these poems about my mother throughout my books. And then she died. And this one focused on her. And so I thought, that's great. This is it. I'm done with my mom. But we're never done with our mom. So I wrote a bunch more. And then Life on Earth has...this newest book... has poems about my mother, but also, you know, it's life on Earth. I mean, it's, as Bob Dylan says, "Life and life only." I don't know where I'm going from here...the grave, you know?  I'm old, Todd, I'm old.

Todd 6:27
Is it all gravy for you at this point? I mean, you've had such a career. You were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize story.

Dorianne 6:30
Well, that was pretty exciting. I mean, I can't say that I wasn't excited about that. And it was gravy. I mean, I never...I was just a kid writing poems and putting them under her bed and not letting anybody see them. Because I thought it was stupid. And you know, I don't know, geeky. And so to have a first book, to have a second book, a third, I mean, to get an actual job from being a poet, which was as a teacher. And then to write a book and have it be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I'm like, what, how in the hell did that happen? You know, but my biggest thrill was to get a poem on the bus.

Todd  6:48 
The Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion program put short poems by great American poets on mass transit systems overhead, where ad placards usually go.

Dorianne  6:59 
Where ordinary people just go into work would read a poem, you know, maybe think about it that day. And...or write it down, because they were very short, you know, and I think that's where it makes the most impact is...when it's in, in public view. And there's no, you don't have to buy book, you don't have to know anything about poetry. You don't have to, you know, it's just there. And, and that's, that's the true impact of poetry, not what scholars say about it, or not analyzing or trying to find the secret of it, or, you know, interpret it. That's all bullshit. It's the poem. Does it move you? Does it make you say, oh, oh, oh,

Todd  7:23
I asked Dorianne if she had a poem she'd written for someone else that she could share with us on this episode.

Dorianne  7:26
Yeah.

Todd  7:27 
She reached for a poem. About her mother.

Dorianne  7:28 
There's one that's probably, of the poems, the most of her. It's that her Singer sewing machine, which I have to explain to young people that everyone in my generation had a little factory in their living room, which was the sewing machine and you made dresses and tablecloths and, you know, everything. It had a treadle. You put your foot on the treadle, and that's how you made the motion. And so this is about her at that machine making us things. Singer. If I could go back to the living room window/ of my childhood house, look again/ through the pane, it would be a telescope lens/ through which I might see the first woman/ I ever met, my mother at her sewing machine,/ rewinding the bobbin, little spool with holes/ like an old movie reel our tiny lives/ spun inside of.  I might see/ her long piano fingers touch the balance wheel,/ the throat plate, the presser bar, one bare foot/ working the treadle, her heel revealing/ only the first three letters in black latticed metal:/ SIN.  My mother was what some called/ a sinful woman: divorced, pregnant/ without a husband, a baby boy given up/ for adoption, remarried, another baby/ born of another man, a one night stand,/ while her husband was away at war./ She drank too much, thought too much,/ laughed with her head thrown back, danced/ with anyone.  Too pretty, too brainy,/ too tall, her black hair a snare/ that hooked men in.  But right now/ she’s fully visible, stretching the fabric/ for a kitchen curtain, a child’s dress,/ swatches she salvaged from the deep/ sale bins, using the selvedge for a hem/ thereby cutting her handwork by half,/ the black oiled mechanism banging out/ dress after dress, tablecloths and runners,/ nothing she couldn’t cobble together/ from the waste of others.  She was/ a very particular, peculiar mother/ and by now you can see why/ we loved her.  She was a lit fuse/ in the rain.  She turned from her work/ and set those same fingers/ on the piano keys and pulled/ music through the air.  Making something/ from nothing was what she was good at:/ love, children, pants and skirts/ to dress them in, a table covered/ with cherries on which the beautiful food/ appeared, roses from her front yard garden/ in an old cracked vase, her long arms/ around our shoulders saying Sit still. Eat./ Try not to spill anything.

Todd  11:06  
Have you ever been hired by an individual to write a poem for them specifically?

Dorianne  11:10  
I...no... I mean, not really. I suppose people have asked me to write a poem, but it's usually a magazine or something. Or it's a theme, you know, they want you to write. I mean, I had friends who would say, "How come you never write a poem about me? I, I'll pay you. I'll pay you to write a poem about me." You know, and that's just somehow not the way it works. Right? You know, you you get the poems that you get, and...

Todd  11:35  
Yet you signed on to be in the bureau and accept commissions. What's that about?

Dorianne  11:43  
Well, I'm, why not give it a shot, I suppose. And also, it's not somebody I know. And I can go (right) anywhere I want with that. 

Todd  11:52  
So somehow the idea of a stranger coming to you is more freeing, artistically.

Dorianne  11:59  
Yeah, that appealed to me. Because I've written poems about strangers. And, I mean, I love strangers. I like them better than people I know.

Todd  12:15  
For complete details about the International Bureau of Custom Poetry and the poets in it, visit our website poeminthat.com/poets. I'm Todd Boss, reminding you that there's a poem in everything now that there's a bureau for that.

Dorianne  12:31  
I'm not vacuuming no tire store.