INTERVIEW WITH
RYLER DUSTIN BY: J.D. ISIP I FOUND THAT YOUR CHAPBOOK, SOMETHING BRIGHT, BRINGS THE READER IN ON A COLLECTIVE MYTHOLOGY. YOU SEEM TO INVITE THE READER TO HEAR THE STORIES OF A GRANDMOTHER, OF A TOWN, OF WHALES, OF CREATION, AND TAKE UP THAT STORY AND CARRY IT WITH THEM. IN “SONG FOR VOYAGERS,” YOU SAY, “ONE PERSON WRITES A STORY, ANOTHER GIVES IT AWAY/ AND A BOY WHO FINDS IT IN THE BOTTOM OF A BOX/ READS IT ALOUD, WALKING HOME IN HIS CORDUROY COAT.” WHAT ARE YOU HOPING READERS GET FROM THESE POEMS? I love your idea about a “collective mythology.” My hope is that this book—though grounded in details about my family, and a Pacific Northwest town with its own history and ecology—connects to deeper questions about being a human in a temporary, always-fragile world. The poem you quoted describes my boyhood wonder inspired not only by books, but by the Voyager spacecrafts, which are hurtling outward from our galaxy, each with a phonograph filled with sounds from earth. These phonographs are time-capsules meant for distant beings. That’s part of what I hope this collection offers to a reader: some record of a distant, alien life, my life. But the other part is just as important, that—as you put it—the book “brings the reader in.” The phonograph on the Voyager spacecrafts is etched with instructions for how to make a record player, how to play a record. It’s a reaching out. I want this book to feel like a grasping hand that says, “Hey, these are things I’ve felt and thought about. Is your form of intelligence asking those same questions?”
IT ISN’T ALWAYS EASY TO WRITE POEMS ABOUT LOVE AND ROMANCE, YET WHEN IT IS DONE WELL – AS IT IS IN SOMETHING BRIGHT (ESPECIALLY IN “FIRST STAR” AND “THE MOVEMENT OF FIELDS”) – IT CAN MAKE THE INCREDIBLY INTIMATE SOMETHING SHARED. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS OR ADVICE ON WRITING ABOUT LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS? DO YOU GIVE YOURSELF RULES OR PARAMETERS? ARE THERE OTHER POETS WHO INSPIRE THESE TYPES OF POEMS? That’s a great question. For me, writing about romance is especially difficult when it comes to deeply impactful relationships that have ended; there’s so much to be conveyed, such a deeply interwoven language that has grown up within such a romance, that it can be difficult to step back and see the whole thing. For years, when I tried to write “First Star,” it was like turning on a fire hose. I would write about every small thing that had happened, abstractly describe every detail or contradiction I had loved. What ultimately worked was to spend years not writing about it, to have other loves and losses. It also helped to tell myself, “I don’t have to write a poem that ‘captures’ this relationship. I’ll just start with one moment, one memory.” And the third thing that worked for me was to find a formal tool or device that could drive the poem forward—in the case of “First Star,” that was music, repeated/echoing sounds. There are optical illusions within which you can only see an object by not looking directly at it. For me, music was the way to have something else to look at—something to push me on from one sentence to the next—so that I wasn’t staring so hard at the thing I needed to see. “The Movement of Fields” was a series of fractures, failed attempts, and I think that a journal of failed attempts at capturing love can be a good way to piece together a truthful portrait, like tilework.
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