Get to Know a Local Poet: Deborah Woodard

As I poked my head into a classroom at Hugo House last Saturday, I didn’t even have to ask if I had found the Emily Dickinson class yet. I knew I had to keep moving because I didn’t recognize anyone from my previous courses with Deborah Woodard (Walt Whitman and Generating Prose Poems), even though it was the first day of class. I finally found my room by the pleasant look of familiar faces alone. Of course, the room was full, and over half of the people have studied previously with Deborah. I sat in amazement. She remembered us all.

Deborah has been inspiring writers here at the Hugo House for twelve years now. Having studied under Charles Simic at the University of New Hampshire, earned a MFA from the University of California-Irvine with the likes of Howard Moss, C.K. Williams and Charles Wright, and completed a PhD dissertation on American women poets at the University of Washington, Deborah knows poetry. Her own poems and class assignments continue challenge perspective and structure by using creative techniques—such as cut-up—made famous by the old surrealists , visual artists and beat poets. Her work has appeared in Action, Yes!, Artful Dodge, Bellingham Review, Chelsea, Monkey Puzzle and The Threepenny Review, among others. Her praises are spoken by published poets, career writers, competition winners, artists and newbies (like me). Deborah’s encouragement and intelligence continue to propel writers take a fresh perspective and, more importantly, to write and write well.

Abby Hagler: You and Guiseppe Leporace just released The Dragonfly, a collaborative translation of Amelia Rosselli’s poems you began in 1995! Can you tell us a bit more about why you chose this project?

Deborah Woodard: I stumbled upon Amelia Rosselli’s work pretty much by accident. A friend of mine in Rome, a translator herself, had sent me a bundle of books she’d culled from her shelves, and Rosselli’s first collection, "Martial Variations," was in the batch. Rosselli’s poetry was difficult to decipher, but I sensed its power. I was studying Italian with Giuseppe at the time, and he, too, fell under the sway of her work. It’s a long story, but we eventually translated "Hospital Series," Rosselli’s second collection. But, along the way, we got tapped for the selected poems and worked on what became "The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems, 1953-1981" (Chelsea Editions).

AH: I think I enjoy the paradox of the way Rosselli’s poems run—literally, almost. Her poems are emotional, associative and meditative, yet swift, never lingering over an image for long. What were some of the difficulties/liberties you discovered in the process of translating this work first linguistically, then poetically?

DW: Rosselli’s poetry is characterized by complex or ruptured syntax and by phrases and word plays that arise from Rosselli’s trilingual status (She was fluent in Italian, English and French.) Pier Paolo Pasolini called her characteristic glitch a “lapsus.” Rosselli never denied the lapsus, but lately I’ve wondered if this was out of respect for her early mentor and supporter, Pasolini. Anyway, many of her so-called errors may be deliberate trilingual experiments. She returned to her own language as a “linguistic immigrant” after years of post-WWII dislocation. Thus, she has the freedom to play with language. Translating her is always for me a very liberating experience. It resembles walking into the wind, given all the linguistic details one has to deal with, and then suddenly having the wind at one’s back. Translating is always an apprenticeship with the writer one translates, and my own poetry has been influenced by this long-term immersion in Rosselli. I learned a lot about the pacing of images: how one can suspend them and then return to them, for instance.

AH: In a review of your recent chapbook, "Hunter Mnemonics" (Hemel Press), the reviewer said that your work “takes the deliberately ordinary world of poets like Richard Hugo and renders it almost surreal.” I picture a poet as a hunter/gatherer in this context. What are some methods you use to collect inspiration in the mundane?

DW: I love your idea of the poet as a hunter/gatherer! In "Hunter Mnemonics" (hemel press), a sequence of five poems that was then beautifully illustrated by Heide Hinrichs, I attempted to create a narrative out of a few fragmentary memories. The core story depicts an actual event—a child’s walk in the woods to an abandoned hunter’s village cabin—but I felt that I needed to keep things in dramatic motion. Consequently, I began reconstituting my own stalled drafts through radical revision that included literally cutting lines up and piecing them back together in new configurations. I had to rely on imagery—or hunting and gathering, if you will—not to embellish the plot but to create further details of it through trusting metaphor and variation. So, the sequence becomes rather dreamlike, or surreal. I also included two puns, one on a dare.

AH: In class, your assignments always involve sort of melding a poem by drawing on two or more completely different sources. What is one of your favorite assignments you’ve been given or have given?

DW: I took an exceptional one-day class at Volunteer Park with Melanie Noel last summer in which I let myself be lead up the water tower blindfolded and made an offering to a gravestone/ graveyard resident and sought advice. These experiences were unique: the vulnerability of the ascent in the cacophonous tower and the peculiarity of (at least permitting oneself to imagine) conversing with the dead and recording the “interview.” I didn’t write a poem, but I had a profound experience.

AH: In your opinion, what would you tell people is the best thing about the Seattle poetry community right now? What is one future goal you envision for our community of writers?

DW: The Seattle literary community is in pretty good shape in that it is still young and still more or less open to all. Young institutions (Pilot Books) coexist with older ones (Open Books), much as the Roethke Reading and Brian McGuigan’s "Cheap Wine and Poetry" transpire within the same city limits. In the Hugo Literary Series, emerging writers read alongside honored guests (who may also be local writers). It is hard to know just where these “components” are wending in terms of a larger literary goal. At the same time as we foster very different esthetics, will Seattle evolve a coherent literary identify the way Brooklyn, for example, suggests a unified esthetic? Or will we remain somewhat frontier-like, scattered and DIY? We should all simply keep writing and see!

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