Dan Bailey writes poetry as if he is the only human being who is consciously aware that he is at all times himself, at all times disconnected—truthfully—from everything around him. We’re just trying to reach out and be connected, to feel what that might be like. Dan Bailey has constructed the poetry of unrequited connection, but it is not unhopeful. It is beautiful and lyrical and full of sound and noise while he writes about the most silent aspects of life.
Bailey’s new poetry collection, A Better Word for the World or Heaven’s Proxy or Waterfalls from Apocalypse Party Press, peers at the stages of life and wonders what it means to sense a change coming soon. What it means to move into a new you, into a new body, into a new experience, and have the people and objects around you change and your ability to grasp them as tangible parts of life remains the same. Flawed. Hopeful.
Bailey writes in “The Unplanned Upon Morning”: There is joy I have yet to live, I tell myself/that is my morning – it is my commute.” Does the nature of love, and joy, change if we do not experience it as something that can be truly shared? As something to be watched and felt, excluded from each other. Joy felt for someone else is not the joy they are feeling. Does this matter?
In “Below the Hovering ID”, Bailey writes: “You like these nights when you can smell yourself/That’s how invested your body is in its own experience.” The collection is broken up into six parts, the emblem of a tree denoting the breaks. The poems range from page length with short lines and vague narrative or none at all, to longer ranging poems that are nearly short stories, characters and plot clear to the reader throughout. Yet in all of his work here, Bailey imparts an incredible interiority into the writing; it is a world inside a brain space inside a book of poetry.
Yet another: in “The Trees Vibrate Wildly”, Bailey writes: “I look at you looking at the trees/and you do not look back/…/our bodies the strangest planets/our lungs containing breath/that when lit will explode.” As if the human being, as we are so constituted, is an anomaly in comparison to the vast majority of life around us. Humans feel eyes on them at all times, and yet maybe are the most unseen of the world, imagining the trees and the bugs and the animals to be so entrapped by this egoistic mindset that they can do nothing but bow at the altar of humankind. Or not.
Once this is accepted, or at least tolerated, this idea of disconnection is when Bailey probes into the questions at the heart of his work. He writes in “The Waterfallness of Water”: “Is it inappropriate to feel that we deserve something from life?/I struggle with this all the time/…/And yet it is inappropriate to feel/that we deserve something/because who has anything to give/but the present space of time we now inhabit.”
I worry that as a reader I too quickly found the theme of this work to be that life is easier lived if it is felt to be linear. We all love a narrative, a narrative that includes other people and items, our possessions and our hobbies and loves. Is life lived that way? Bailey writes in “A Hell of too Many Miracles”: “I have suffered at the ease of my existence, I think/and then erase the thought.” I don’t know. Does it matter to know who you are? To know whom you love?
In “River of Fire”: “I’m at my lowest when I feel/like I know who I am.”
Are you living in Georgia still?
Yeah, in Athens. I’ve been here for 7 or 8 years now.
In this book of poetry, you mention a lot of nature, and rivers, not to mention the title, are you drawing off the nature around you in Athens? Where does that come from?
I feel like that’s kind of part of it. Prior to living here I was in Colorado. People go there for the nature, but I feel like the nature here is a lot more interesting, it’s a lot more wild. Really thick forest, a lot of slow, winding rivers. Getting out into that for me is a lot more enjoyable than going onto a mountain where you’re just out in the sun. So, actually this whole collection was actually written in Georgia.
With your excursions into the forest, do you go out looking for ideas to write about? Or is it simply spending time outside, and letting the ideas come to you later on?
I spend time outside. I’m not someone who’s looking for inspiration for a poem. I know some people think you always have to be looking for that, that you have to be writing all the time. I haven’t written in a while. I go through these phases where I’ll have a few weeks or a month where I’m pretty productive and then the faucet turns off for a while. Because of that, this book was written pretty much over the entire time I’ve been in Georgia. It’s been written in spurts over that time.
What’s the most recent poetry in the collection?
Definitely something towards the end of the book. Those last two sections, really the last three sections, are the newer poems. The first part of the book was written closer to the time I moved here.
Did you have an intention with the section breaks?
My different spurts of writing this book were formally and thematically similar. It’s broken into sections based on timeframe and there are all kinds of different ways I was thinking about it. I was sitting on the porch at this old house I used to live at – this hundred year old, shitty southern house – where I would sit down with a piece of copy paper and a sharpie and I would write in all caps “NO LINE BREAKS” and the idea was just flowing out my thoughts. I also was trying to write non-sequiturs but I realized those were blending into each other in this really fun way. That’s some of the older ones. I did a thing where I had 13 or 14 pieces of paper where I would go from one to the next writing a line at a time all in one night. That was one section. Some of the newer ones – probably the last half of the book – I had a Google doc that I titled “Waterfalls.” I love waterfalls, there’s something about them that is just beautiful and relaxing to me. And I wanted that to be the emotional guide for when I typed words into that.
Do you use those strategies on purpose to stretch your brain into different places before you start writing?
I’ve never had a desk. I mean I have. But not some sort of consistent writing setup, because that seems boring to me. It feels like you’re doing work, and I don’t want to feel like I’m doing work when I’m writing. I try to find different ways to mix it up. I had this idea for writing: I want to tape a bunch of pieces of paper up to the wall and when I’m going around, doing my thing, write a line or two when I feel like it. That’s one plan I have for when the busyness of my life settles down a bit.
The poem, “We Don’t Die/We Multiply” gave me the idea that for parts of this book at least, I get the sense that the narrator is watching humans and life go by from this alien point of view as if, if you lived in a forested area or something similar, all of a sudden human life can seem like the outsider in the context of the nature that seems so natural and consistent.
I think that I’m sort of a cynical person in a lot of ways. I definitely view this as…well I’m not fully cynical, there’s a spiritual something in the world, that can’t be grabbed or anything like that. But it’s there, and it’s about trying to find these contradictions and the ways things bounce up against each other in strange ways. That’s a big motivation for me to write, to try to make sense of these weird contradictions. I have the book in front of me, so the one about Wal-Mart, that’s almost a profane space. But I’m kind of drawn to that. That’s the job of poetry to me, to reconcile these things with the nature of reality.
If you think about Wal-Mart, it’s this ridiculous instance of the most human space. Or, you talk about the trumpeter in one poem who “breaks the silence” with his instrument, and how only silence can be broken. Noise can’t be broken into silence; it can only be done the other way. I bolded that poem in my notes. It’s the kind of simple idea that I’d never grab onto normally.
Nature is an inherently violent thing as well. Human beings have this tendency to think of ourselves as not part of nature. We look at a building and think, “That’s not nature.” But really it is though. It’s nature in the same way that a termite under a bird’s nest is nature. We’re animals too, we just happen to operate at a different level mentally. I always thought that was a strange thing, that we try to separate ourselves from that. It’s interesting, on Amazon my book is categorized under Nature Poetry and I guess that’s technically correct, but I’m not like Mary Oliver. She was a true nature poet. She apparently hid little pencils in the woods and jotted down lines of poetry, and had the pencils in case she forgot one on a walk. She gets really intense with naming species and things like that. I don’t view us that way. I view us [humanity] as a part of that, like when I go to Wal-Mart. I’m technically going into nature, is how I look at it. In that sense, every poem is a nature poem, I guess.
Why do you think humans have that inclination to mark down the dividing line between nature and humanity?
I think as a species we have quite the ego. We want to think of ourselves as distinct and bigger than everything else which is strange. I don’t think other animals do that. I don’t think a tree does that. I don’t think even – we call lions the king of the jungle even though they don’t really live in the jungle – they don’t have an ego, they have instinct and that’s it.
Another big theme I picked up on in some of the poems was about the narrative humans build around their lives. And so we almost try to build narratives into parts of nature and to also further delineate that away from humanity. You have some lines like: “I misremember all the moments I’ve jettisoned/during the mission of me against so many mes” or “I have suffered at the ease/of my existence, I think/and then erase the thought.” We look back and put our lives into phases to make it simpler for us to think about how we’ve changed. That might work into how we convince ourselves that nature doesn’t have those phases.
It makes life easier because we’re able to compartmentalize certain things. I had this certain era of my life that was painful, so I want to put that into a box. That way I can put a clear dividing line between me and that so I can get beyond it. It’s a strange thing to do, but necessary. But we still have to acknowledge those tough things.
There’s the line in “The River of Fire”: “I feel at my lowest when I feel/like I know who I am.” What did you mean by that?
I don’t know. I enjoy the discomfort of uncertainty.
One line that does tie into the compartmentalization I think is: “Sometimes it’s necessary/to build a bunker in your thoughts/and to climb in with a live one/and to shut the door/and pull the pin.” I wrote down, lives are lived in phases, what does it mean for those who realize it?
I remember that one feeling like, which I was in kind of a mood at that point, when I wrote that one. I think it’s the idea that we all have done stupid things even if we think we do or not. We’re all wrong. And that’s fine, that we’re all wrong. We get mad at each other when we think someone else is wrong, but we all need to be self-aware in that sense.
I haven’t had the chance to read your previous collections, but how does this one work into the context of your work?
This one feels to me like the crystallization of my ideal version of what poetry can do. I think that’s part of the reason I’ve had trouble writing, is that I feel I wrote what I always wanted to write. The one before this, Gather Me, that was my MFA thesis, and that one was a little messier and I let it be a lot messier. The one before that was sort of rambling. I view those three books as a trilogy. The first one is dealing with growing up and going to church and dealing with the loss of faith. Building into the next one, the second one was just accepting the reality that is, based on what isn’t anymore.
Going to wrap it up. What are you reading right now or do you have any poetry recommendations?
Light-Up Swan by Tom Snarsky, A Completely Nonexistent Carnival by Cavin Gonzalez. The one I’ve liked the most recently is Coolth by Hajara Quinn. I love that one, the way the lines move. I like a poem with good motion and that book absolutely has it.
I can hear birds chirping. What’s your view right now? What are you looking at?
I’m out on the porch. Backyard is all fenced in. Growth everywhere. I think that was a cardinal you heard. There’s a play set for the kids.