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DORRIANE LAUX
g Interview by Josh McNair
Featured Poet
I grew up in San Diego, California in the mid-fifties, which at that time was a small barren border town populated largely by military families. I guess my early influences came from living in that environment: harsh sunlight, the smell of the ocean, the scrubby landscape. I think it was the canyons that were most important to me growing up, an open place I could go to be alone, to watch life poking up out of the hard soil, if you could call it soil, caliche, a hard-packed dust really, moonscape, but with gray green sage brush, stunted trees, and infinitesimally small flowers struggling upward only to be battered down by the sun. If you were a plant or an animal you had to be committed to life to survive there. I think that gnarled struggle influenced me quite a bit. Another early influence was music. My mother played piano and so there was always live music being played in the house. In addition, I was allowed to observe, first hand, the kind of discipline, commitment, and love it took to be an artist. I had many brothers and sisters and there was always much work to be done, so I also saw how art could be a seamless part of daily life. I watched my mother go back to school at a late age and get a nursing degree. She worked in the emergency room and was one of the first women paramedics. It was a long and satisfying career for her, as well as a job that was necessary and important. I think my project as a poet has been to showcase these small, daily heroes who get up each morning and do the work that needs to be done and struggle with little reward and much sacrifice to build a life for themselves and others. And do it with a kind of grace. These ordinary heroes are so little seen and praised, like those small, insignificant flowers that you might not notice unless you get down close to the earth. And reading. My mother was a great reader and so I learned the love of reading from her. In the midst of whatever chaos the family was engaged in, I could sneak away with a good book and escape from all of it. There were also many terrible secrets in my family, as there are in many families, and the perverse part of me wanted to expose those secrets, break them open like rocks. The poems were my secrets. I began writing at twelve, the rhymed and silly poems of a twelve-year-old to be sure, but they were the beginnings of finding a voice. Reading and writing helped me to build an interior life, helped me learn to name my feelings and think for myself. The combination of music and reading, as well as the harsh landscape and chaos of the family, all went into the shaping of a poetic self.
I took my notebook to the JM: The earliest volume of your work that I have been able to hunt down Laundromat and wrote while the is a Five Fingers book titled “Three West Coast Women.” You have done clothes spun in the washer and my other work with Kim Addonizio, so I assume that there is some sort of relationship there. Can you explain the idea behind “Three West Coast Women?” daughter ran around looking into DL: “Three West Coast Women” was what might be called a combined the glass portholes of the dryers. chapbook: three chapbooks published under one cover. I lived in Berkeley at the time and my friends, poets Kim Addonizio and Laurie Duesing, and I all wanted to try to get a book published, but we were rather scared to try it on our own. So, we decided to try to publish as a group, kind of all for one and one for all. The Three Musketeers of poetry! So, we sent the combined book to our friends over at Five Fingers Review and they liked the idea. Kim was one of the five editors there so she helped pave the way. We did most of the work ourselves, paid for most of it, and peddled it ourselves. The whole project was more fun than fearful and arduous. JM: In your initial statement, you said that you began writing poems at a very young age (12). Did you write consistently until you began publishing? I realize that you were quite busy during this time, and I assume your writing took a backseat to the finer things. Is this what happened? If so, what in your life helped facilitate your becoming more focused on poetry? DL: Yes, I wrote more or less throughout my young adulthood, whenever I could find some time to be alone with my notebook. I made forays back to school to take courses in English and Composition. I was in my late twenties by then and had a young child. But I was a closet poet. My therapist, Joel Rosen, to whom my first book is dedicated, encouraged me to go to a local bookstore where he said other poets and writers gathered to share their work. I also took an evening workshop with the poet Steve Kowit and began to read more widely and take my writing more seriously. The poems I had written on my own I brought in to class.