On Creativity: Marita Dachsel

cover design: Rayola.com, image by Maggie Taylor

 

 

I was introduced to Marita Dachsel’s work back in 2008, when I reviewed her book, All Things Said & Done (Caitlin Press, 2007), for GLOSS, an online Canadian arts publication I used to write for. When my review copy of that book arrived, I knew I’d love it--the cover featured an illustration of a grill, in clean lines and in the color of pencil lead, set against blank space. Familiar objects, isolated and made odd (or revealed to be innately odd)--that’s just what Dachsel’s poems do.

In Glossolalia, her newest release (with an equally stunning cover!), her poems are voiced by the wives of Joseph Smith (founder of the Latter Day Saint movement). All thirty-four of them. My head spins trying to imagine how she crafted/heard these characters--and with such respect and care, too. Dachsel’s poems honor the experiences of these women as individuals.



NOTE: After the interview below, read two of the poems from this book, "Emma Hale Smith: Two" and "Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde," both of which appear with permission from the author/publisher. Purchase a copy here. Also, you can enter her giveaway for a chance to win a free copy of her book (woohoo!) here.

Q: Reading Glossolalia, I was amazed by the different voice(s) speaking each poem. I’m wondering how you went about building/inhabiting the voices of these poems. What was your process like for hearing/puppeteering your speakers? How does voice work in any of your poems?

A: Thank you! From the very beginning I realized that voice was going to be vital to the collection. In fact, one of the impetuses for writing Glossolalia was to give voice to women who were largely forgotten and ignored by history.

I knew it would be a challenge to make sure every wife/poem sounded distinct. These women has so much in common—united by time, place, faith, and husband—there was a danger of the collection having a homogenous quality and I worked hard so it wouldn’t be. My approach differed depending on the poem and where I was in the journey of writing the collection. It was about six years from the first draft of the first poem to when I signed off on the last correction before it was sent to publication. I changed a lot as a writer over that time, and so did how I approached the material and the rewrites.

Research fuelled the writing. I read two really great biographies on Joseph Smith’s wives—Emma Hale Smith: Mormon Enigma about his first wife and In Sacred Loneliness about 32 others. I read anything I could get my hands on about the early church and his wives, but those two books were the ones I kept returning to.

Some of the women became very important figures in early Mormonism, wrote themselves or were written about a lot, while others there was almost nothing known. It was important to me that my work was neither a hagiography, nor character assassinations just because it might make an interesting poem. I wanted to preserve a degree of authenticity in their portrayals while leaving much room for invention. There is a danger in writing about history, that one can be too true to the “truth” while the art suffers. I desperately wanted to avoid that.

So I read and read and read about these women until I ‘heard’ their voices in my head. I fully acknowledge that this sounds incredibly wanky, but it’s true. Sometimes I could see them, too. I’d have a strong feeling on how they sounded before I knew what they wanted to say. Sometimes it came to me straight away, like Sarah Ann Whitney’s sassy voice and clear narrative. Of course her poem was reworked and tweaked a lot, but it didn’t change dramatically over the years.

But then Emma Hale Smith, possibly my favourite wife, look six years to get right. It was an Emma poem that I wrote first, before I even knew that I was going to be writing a series, but I couldn’t crack her. I probably wrote close to thirty fairly separate poems for her before getting her voice and story right. Because I have such fondness for her—she was Joseph’s first wife and lived such a complicated life—I really wanted to do her justice. I felt she deserved it. Bur really, six years for one poem! Madness.

With the poems, not only did I need to get the voices right through vocabulary and cadence, but also what they chose to reveal or not. With Lucy Walker I spent years trying to recreate her voice and story when finally I realized that I had to stop trying do what she had already done. (All italics in the book are the women’s own words.)  I had to use her words, but focus on form. Choosing the right form took a lot of exploration and play, but it made sense thematically to play with erasure for her.

A specific example of how voice works in one of my poems is in “Maria and Sarah Lawrence,” a poem for two voices. Smith had married at least four sets of sisters and one mother/daughter pair. I knew I wanted to explore this dynamic, wanting to capture the closeness of siblings, the push and pull of being a unit, yet the craving for individuality. I could hear them talking at the same time, sometimes over each other, sometimes sharing phrases. Their individuality comes out in word choices and details they choose to share. There is a tension between the two of them. It’s a poem that I had thought worked best on the page as it’s impossible to read properly aloud by myself, but I did a reading where I pulled my dear friend Jennica Harper up on stage and we read it together. It was so satisfying to hear it like that.

As you can see, I can go on about these women, these poems. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to answer your question.

***
Two poems from Glossolalia (Anvil Press, 2013), both of which are printed with permission



Emma Hale Smith: Two


I believe he was everything he professed to be.

I believe I believed. Joseph,
you were everything, everything
I believed. I profess.
You believed everything.
You professed everything.
I believed you
until I couldn’t.

I confess.

I lose you.
I lose you my life over.
I lost you.

*

How old am I now?
Can you tell by my voice? My hands?
The way I sigh?

A person does not lose faith—
it is not a hairpin or a tooth.
Faith evolves, salvaged.
A grove becomes a house.
A fire becomes ashes.

What will be my last thought?
My last words? Will I call to you?






Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde


& these are my tomatoes   
planted 24 varieties this year
been collecting seeds, trading
for almost a decade

here I feel
      like a patriarch
fingers splayed, laying hands
blessing the rows

like a wife, these plants respond
well to attention, a gentle sweep
of the leaves, tickle of the flower
& they won’t stop giving

now,
           bring your palms to your face,
inhale
           oh, that smell

can you imagine?
after all these years
I still can’t find the right words
to describe their scent