Dorothea Lasky

Fuck no to all that (PoemTalk #209)

Sadie Dupuis, “Cry Perfume”

From left: Hannah Albertine, Sadie Dupuis, Dorothea Lasky

LISTEN  TO THE SHOW

This episode of PoemTalk brought together Hannah Albertine, Sadie Dupuis, and Dorothea Lasky to talk about three poems in Sadie’s book Cry Perfume. We took advantage of Sadie’s presence in the very studio where we make our poetry recordings and asked her to perform the poems as part of our conversation about them. The book can be acquired HERE

This was one of those PoemTalk episodes where the four people in the room knew each other well in various contexts and relational vectors, so — you will notice almost immediately: it gets particularly digressive and almost riotously friendly — all to the better, we feel. Thus during editing Al and Zach decided in favor of leaving in all the deviations, parentheses, detours, and periphrasis. The mode befits Sadie’s verse and, especially, her critique of commodified versions of media from which a poem (or at least these poems) can be exceptions and alternatives. Fuck no to all that, she says — and the PoemTalkers agree.

Dorothea Lasky: What is between us

Notes on her recent work

Dorothea Lasky, photo by Dorothea Lasky

Poems about the poems themselves, such as “Gender,” tempt us to underestimate or even to dismiss metapoetical claims: “I write poems about boobs and dicks.” This is of course deceptive, a misdirection, because ultimately, in every Lasky poem, the words (and overall the voicings of ecstatic, troubled experience) come as a remedy for language’s absence as otherwise the expected state. “I write poems about boobs and dicks,” yes, “But my anger comes not from this / But from being silenced / So that I hate what they like / Not listening to me / So that I could go on and on.”