Y’know, the reality is that I feel the dash: it vibrates somewhere between the comma and the period-faster than the former, more open than the latter, carrying a little bit of effect from both. It even looks liminal: line between this and that, above and below― Put your thumbs gently to the back of my neck-įor me, the em dash provides a visual semblance to many of the subjects you take on, all of which possess a sense of liminality: death, possession, violence, belief.ĭL: Liminality, yes. I want to wake up, I don’t want to wake up. As an example, here’s a section of “Sibylline.” When I encounter a dash in your work, I never feel that it’s out of place, distracting, or showy. I have an aversion to blocks of text (except in the case of the prose poem) I like to read and write poems where script tangos with white space, where silence and the invisible can thrum under or beside the spoken and the seen.ĮP: Would you mind likewise talking about your use of the em dash? It may be, I think, somewhat in vogue, if punctuation can be “in vogue” (Thanks, Emily), but it may be that, for some poets, it’s mutated from a tool in the bag to a tick of the hand. But sometimes visual considerations come into play. This includes trying to mimic dramatic unfoldment, via line length and line break. 90% of it is an attempt to capture the pace and volume of the speaking voice speaking the line or stanza, as I hear it in my head (poetry’s strange synesthesia!). Will you speak to your consideration of and attention to form during the drafting process? On average, how much maneuvering do you do of words/lines before it looks right to you?ĭana Levin: Oh I spend an alarming amount of time moving lines and enjambments and indentations around it’s my primary OCD behavior. ![]() In just three short poems in Sky Burial, we move from the irregular, “Cathartes Aura,” that tends to privilege single lines over stanzas, into the long-lined, left-aligned stanza sections of “Letter to GC” to the terraced three- or two-lined stanzas of “Pure Land.” Any time that I see your name on a journal, my first thought is: “I want to see what her poem(s) look like!” Your poems constantly reinvent themselves on the page. ![]() A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations, Levin teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico.Įmilia Phillips: Let’s start at the surface and work our way deeper. Dana Levin is the author of In the Surgical Theatre, Wedding Day, and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared recently in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, APR, Agni, and Poetry.
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