Art is the Antidote: An Interview with Dave Harrity

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Christopher McCurry: You’ve got two new books out, Our Father in the Year of the Wolf (WordFarm, 2016) and These Intricacies (Wipf and Stock, 2015), what’s it like honoring and promoting each work? Because, honestly, I’m imagining having two newborn babies needing your undivided attention.

Dave Harrity: Oddly enough, this is a pattern in my life—my wife and I have two kids 11 months apart. Finally found something I’m good at. Ha! In earnest, it’s been tough giving them both their fair due. The saving grace of the whole things is that the books are quite different—These Intricacies is spiritual and meditative, as well as accessible and straightforward. Our Father is another matter—it’s conceptual and more transgressive. The book is also experimental or ecstatic in some places, playing with a diversity of motifs, texts, and tropes. For me, this means I’ve got two different audiences to consider. I tend to read from one or the other based on the audience, or steer a potential reader to one or the other once I understand his or her preferences. When I go to teach a workshop, I tend to sell These Intricacies; at a literary reading, Our Father. But it’s most dependent on what the person in front of me is looking for from poetry.

Was your approach to writing the books different as well?

Very. One of the books gathered together my first poems, written over 10-ish years, that I tried to revise into a coherent collection. The other, Our Father, was conceived as a larger sequence of poems, so I spent time directing attention to a project, trying to align the work I was making to a larger vision. Kinda opposite ways of one another when I think about it.

I’d like you to share your drafting process. I mean, I know how you do what you do, but I think others would find it useful. So take us through it?

My drafting process isn’t particularly unique, I don’t think—it is rather systematic and practical. I write every day, or almost every day. When a journal is filled, I take the poems and type them up and print them out. Then I go about sorting them into piles, taking into account the tone, voice, personae, or style of each and grouping them together with other like-minded pieces. Or I think of the smaller pieces being part of larger projects—it varies from poem to poem. I think of it like I’m the host of a cocktail party for all the poems. My job is to mingle around, make sure things are working for everyone. When a poem feels like it’s speaking with me, I engage it in a process of becoming more familiar. I revise, I rewrite—by hand. I then begin sorting the poems into smaller piles yet again once they’re revised. I send some of those poems out and am able to keep track of what’s been worked on, even if it’s just five poems at a time.

I can see how both of these books would form out of this writing process for sure. One thing that I notice that’s shared between these two books of yours is the love of language. You even go all Shakespeare and invent words. So how does one make a new word?

Hah! I’m glad you like it and don’t find it presumptuous or overly silly. Yeah, I like making up words! What good is being a poet if you can’t make things up and get away with it? I love language, of course, and I’m the kind of person that thinks that loving often means adding to. I don’t look for opportunities to make up words, but when they arise, I’m pleased. I love a good onomatopoeic word. I think my love of that comes from comic books. I also love a made up word that sounds like it would be a dirty word—that comes from… well, those words just come up.

When I make up a word, I’m mostly concerned that the sound of the word matches the intended meaning—if it doesn’t sound right then it will never work. Not sure that’s helpful, but that’s how it usually occurs. I’m writing and then I see the occasion and then something emerges as I say sounds aloud. Simple enough, I guess. And arrogant as all get out, too. And a bit silly.

Sometimes it seems like writing is work but you, more than anyone else I know, seem to be having fun, even when your work is intense linguistically and thematically. What about writing creates or sustains that?

Oh man… that’s a high compliment to me, and I’m glad you feel that way, that such a thing can come through the work. I don’t view writing as a chore, though I know there are many authors who do, which always seems strange to me. The practice of going into a void is what sustains me. Each day a blank page, each day something new to wander into. I’m pretty mundane, so my work is where I can push the boundaries.

Some people, I suppose, carry this kinda thing like dead weight, a burden… I think it was Linus from Peanuts who said something like there’s no greater burden than potential, which is both delightfully hilarious and profound. He’s right, I guess. But there’s another way to look at potential, which is to see it as guileless opportunity, that the pressure is off and you can just amble through what you’re impulses are telling you to make.

Writing every day makes the act of creating a routine, and routines carry with them a certain amount of clarity and simplicity. If you ask me, writing really should be like brushing your teeth in the way that it fits into your day—no one anticipates revelation from flossing, but that’s often how it comes up for me. It’s more hypnogogic than rote. I think that’s a good space to create from.

If someone were to ask me how these two books are different, I think I would have to say Our Father in the Year of the Wolf feels traumatic, as in it is dealing with trauma, and These Intricacies feels like an exploration and healing process. Does that make sense? Would you agree? How do these two books capture humanity, in your mind?

I think that is correct in a lot of ways. These intricacies is essentially a bildungsroman collection, if such a thing exists. It’s me struggling to become me. It’s also more implicitly personals to my direct experience, with many of the poems spun from my life, though not all of them. The collection begins with tension and ends with clarity.

Our Father contains a great deal of fictional/imaginative fantasticism. But that doesn’t make it less real, obviously—hopefully more in that way that art can and horror does. In fact, the book was codified by a traumatic event in my own life—the suicide of a friend (the title poem is a monologue written in his voice and lives at the heart of the collection). The rest of the book revolves around this utterance. Our Father also deals with the corrosive nature of power and ubiquity of violence, something to which every person I know is familiar with in some way.

Ultimately, my hope for my work is wrapped up in an artistic performance of my own humanity—that’s what I want from making art. I want to feel more human, be more human—evolve; spirituality, consciousness, corporeality, and the muck of being embodied are pieces of the same whole for me. I have no shame about this, for better or worse.

I want others to recognize their humanness in the work as well, not so that such a thing can be possessed or domesticated, but that it might be more fully embodied and understood as a potential strength within them. There are so many ways we take our strengths and reimagine them as liabilities and I’m exhausted with such toxicity; many people ask us to do this kind of soul killing work—the worst kinds of profs, preachers, principalities. It makes me sad and ill to see that fear and shame. Art is the antidote in many ways. What else do I have to create with but my own imagination and humanity? I’m trying to lean into that as best I can.