Interview with South Dakota Poet Laureate Lee Ann Roripaugh
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Lee Ann, we appreciate you joining us for our regional issue, Prairie Mountain! As you were raised in Wyoming and currently live in South Dakota, you were the perfect candidate for an interview—a bit of a double whammy if you will, as both of these states are highlighted in this issue. What do you find the most inspiring about living in the northern mid-west? How has this region affected you and your writing?
Lee Ann Roripaugh: Place is formative, I think. It provides our most immediate interactions with and sensory impressions of the world, and when we are young, the places that we live become our world. I have a theory that many of us are initially imprinted by place, and these imprints linger with or even haunt us in a powerfully foundational way—whether it’s the rock and clatter of an urban subway, the distinctive silhouette of a city skyline, the tea-light glow of a field of stubble corn in November. For me, having grown up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I feel imprinted by open sky, epic clouds, and the formidable horizon of mountains. I find this landscape impossibly beautiful, but also dangerous, uncertain, and humbling and perhaps this unconsciously informs or drives some of my aesthetic choices. Also, I feel less mentally claustrophobic in big sky—as if my thoughts can freely expand into a vast expanse of blue and I can truly hear myself think. (As well as spot predators approaching from a distance!) And perhaps this unconsciously reveals something about my artistic preferences and processes?
UtSQ: Which writers from the Prairie Mountain area (Minnesota, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, or Montana) should we be reading?
LAR: This will be scattershot and undoubtedly hugely reductive/incomplete, but Melissa Kwasny from Montana is a marvelously smart and exquisite poet and prose writer who everyone should be reading. Danielle Pafunda, now located in Wyoming, is bringing her fierce and feral feminist aesthetic to the foothills of the Rockies. Heidi Czerwiec, from North Dakota, is producing a saucy and elegant meta-poetic formalism, and Tiffany Midge, from Idaho, is creating sharply observant interrogations of pop culture and American Indian identity alternating with rich lyrics. Minnesota must-reads include Ed Bok Lee, Wang Ping, Kristin Naca, Matt Mauch, and Richard Robbins. And bringing it back home back to South Dakota, Christine Stewart’s powerful lyric meditations on mothered embodiment, as well as Patrick Hick’s moving chronicle of adopting his Korean-born son, are terrific. Finally, I’d like to give a shout out to my talented colleague at the University of South Dakota, Natanya Pulley, who writes outstanding memoir intersecting identity, family, and place, as well as poetry and innovative fiction. And I’d also like to mention Layli Long Soldier, who—although living and teaching in Arizona—has South Dakota roots, and writes powerful poems interrogating language and cultural identity.
UtSQ: Tell us about your first significant literary encounter. How did this experience inspire you, or shape you?
LAR: My father is also a writer, and so I grew up in a literary household, and I remember going to poetry readings at a very early age. I most likely heard Yusef Komunyakaa (who years later directed my M.F.A. thesis at Indiana University), then a student at Colorado, read at High Country Books in Laramie. Gary Snyder gave a reading at the University of Wyoming and came to dinner at our house. I had poems accepted to the Owen Wister Review when I was twelve or thirteen, and at the magazine launch, I shared a stage with other contributors and John Edgar Wideman, who was teaching at the University of Wyoming at the time. Although I eventually went to school to study piano performance at Indiana University, I realized in my mid-twenties, that writing formed my best self, and when I began to seriously write again, on my own terms, it was like coming home again.
UtSQ: I recently read your new book, Dandarians (Milkweed Editions 2014), and I was quite taken with the immediate and constant presence of nature in your work. This could be said about many writers, but I enjoyed the unique way you included and interpreted nature in your poetry. Much of your nature imagery in Dandarians is distorted and sometimes even grotesque; for example, this passage from “Trompe L’oeil: The Annotated Version”:
What gets buried. So many secretive tubers and roots, all simmering underground. They gestate, pulsate, and bulge, almost radioactive in their insistent tumescence—febrile root hairs whiplashing the homely earthworm-kissed faces of moles blindly tunneling by.
This book places much of its focus on culture-clashing and familial relationships. How do these dark images relate to your personal experience, and was it your intent to counterpoint a mainstream view of nature?
LAR: I definitely want to resist clichéd, bucolic representations of nature. I feel that nature is much more interesting, contradictory, feral, and surreal. And that “beauty” in nature, for me, only really emerges when in tension with these richly strange and complex contexts. People, too, are natural organisms with complex familial and cultural contexts, and for all of our self-consciousness and intellect, we sometimes act out in feral, violent, self-destructive ways. We all also carry, deep within us, powerfully instinctive fight or flight responses. And so to mirror/reflect or juxtapose dark or traumatic experiences with darkly strange images of nature makes a kind of larger sense to me, in that human nature is a form of and a part of nature as well.
UtSQ: One of the central themes of Dandarians is interpretation—of words, of course, as the title is an altered pronunciation of “dandelions,” but also how our differing interpretations of language can reach further to embrace a larger construct or definition. Your poem “Animoaney” is a wonderful example of this:
When my mother says the word anemone, as when she says the name of any flower, she says it like something perfect and beautiful in the mouth. Animoaney, she says. It begins like animosity, rhymes with alimony and acrimony. Exotic creature beckoning tentacles on the oceanic substrate. The moan in the name invoking a salt-bitten saturation of tears, sessility of the thing left behind. Acrimony like an acrid whiff of chlorine. The smell I come to think of as the sharp harpoon of shame.
What drove you to explore this compelling theme in your work? What other themes in Dandarians did you set out to specifically examine?
LAR: Ultimately, I see Dandarians as being a book about language—language as a(n impossible) form of desire, or yearning, to connect self with other. The slippery, mispronounced signifiers of my childhood, which I thought of as Word Betrayals, created a hybridized, imaginatively rich liminal linguistic space for me—full of marvelous connotative density and complex meaning. As with all hybrid, liminal spaces, this was also simultaneously a fraught and dangerous space. And so while all signifiers are, ultimately, slippery, and while language is a symbolic contract that will never represent the thing itself, I see this desire or yearning for connection/communication is hopeful, the materiality of this desire in language itself a thing of strange beauty, and the act of listening, reading, and receiving as an act of imaginative collaboration. All of the poems in this volume, in addition to the Word Betrayal pieces, reflect or engage in themes of communication, miscommunication, transmission, and reading/reception in one way or another: from the communicative biosemiotics of fireflies and cuttlefish, to reading the seasonal shifts of the Vermillion River as a kind of text, to the expressive performativity of gender, to dream poems as a communiqué from the unconscious, to the sexy siren song of moth pheromones.
UtSQ: What do you find exciting, hopeful, or promising about poetry right now?
LAR: I feel as if, stylistically, there’s such a wide range of aesthetic possibility open to poets writing right now. That the forms are fluid, genre-hybrid, and fascinatingly recombinatory. That poets have immense stylistic freedom to apply a wide palette of approaches and techniques to create ideal fit, tension, and interplay between form and content.
I also feel as if we are finally beginning to have seriously difficult conversations about hegemonic publishing practices and marginalized voices. The VIDA Count and the subsequent VIDA WOC Count have been crucial to raising awareness of and initiating conversations about marginalized voices, and poet-critics such as Timothy Yu or Haryette Mullen, to name a few, have been providing significant critical scaffolding with respect to issues such as cultural commodification/tokenism of POC voices and hegemonic exclusions of POC voices with respect to experimental poetry. I think these discussions are long overdue and—yes!—exciting, hopeful, and significantly promising for poetry.
UtSQ: Aside from writing, you are also the editor-in-chief of South Dakota Review. How long have you been with SDR? What is your favorite thing about being an editor? What is the most challenging aspect of editing a literary journal?
LAR: I’ve been working with South Dakota Review on and off since 2000, when I accepted my teaching position at the University of South Dakota. I served several stints as acting editor of the magazine, under the editorshop of Brian Bedard. When I took over the magazine in 2011, I made a commitment/mission to both aesthetic and cultural diversity. Every one of my issues so far has been gender balanced, and includes both writers of color and queer voices, with a wide spectrum of aesthetic approaches. It is a particular joy for me, as an editor, to assemble these heady, eclectic blends and enjoy the surprises of these very different voices sparking up against one another. The most challenging aspect of editing a literary journal, particularly a quarterly literary journal, is the unrelenting tide of the slush pile and, I feel, having to turn down high quality work by excellent writers due to issues of space and fit.
UtSQ: What’s next for you? Are you willing to share any details about your next project, be it a book, trying out that new restaurant, conquering the world?
LAR: I was very recently named the new Poet Laureate for the State of South Dakota, and so I’m very excited about this opportunity! I’ll be spending the next four years traveling throughout the state giving readings and workshops and fostering literary community, as well as collaborating on various literary projects.
In terms of my own writing, I’m currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Tsunami vs. The Fukushima 50, which is a project that emerged in response to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake/tsunami and subsequent Fukushima disaster in Japan. I wish to commemorate Fukushima, and focus public/cultural/artistic attention on Fukushima's ongoing legacies, particularly with respect to environmental crises. Within this project, I've turned to tropes of otherness/difference in tandem with questions of mutation and radioactivity employed within comic books (X-Men or Godzilla, for example) as a means of confronting issues raised by the Fukushima disaster. In addition to providing a vehicle by which to consider the ecocritical and cultural implications of the Fukushima disaster, this project has blossomed into a canvas that works with aspects of personal and cultural psychological trauma, gender performance and queer identities, the taboo of female rage, and ideas of the monstrous/grotesque.
UtSQ: Finally, Lee Ann, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, what would you talk about, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
LAR: I would love to have a meal with Geryon from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.
We’d order lychee martinis, sushi, and bouquets of uni (sea urchin) in ponzu sauce garnished with orchids.
It would be awkward, of course. Too introverted for extensive conversation, Geryon would be uncomfortably fidgeting his wings during dinner—intently photographing the waiters with his old school Leica as they moved back and forth through the blue skim and glow of the restaurant aquarium. But sometimes we’d shyly smile at each other. And after the first lychee martini, I might surreptitiously send him a text: a quail’s egg is a tiny sun sliding down the horizon of my throat.
Lee Ann Roripaugh: Place is formative, I think. It provides our most immediate interactions with and sensory impressions of the world, and when we are young, the places that we live become our world. I have a theory that many of us are initially imprinted by place, and these imprints linger with or even haunt us in a powerfully foundational way—whether it’s the rock and clatter of an urban subway, the distinctive silhouette of a city skyline, the tea-light glow of a field of stubble corn in November. For me, having grown up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I feel imprinted by open sky, epic clouds, and the formidable horizon of mountains. I find this landscape impossibly beautiful, but also dangerous, uncertain, and humbling and perhaps this unconsciously informs or drives some of my aesthetic choices. Also, I feel less mentally claustrophobic in big sky—as if my thoughts can freely expand into a vast expanse of blue and I can truly hear myself think. (As well as spot predators approaching from a distance!) And perhaps this unconsciously reveals something about my artistic preferences and processes?
UtSQ: Which writers from the Prairie Mountain area (Minnesota, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, or Montana) should we be reading?
LAR: This will be scattershot and undoubtedly hugely reductive/incomplete, but Melissa Kwasny from Montana is a marvelously smart and exquisite poet and prose writer who everyone should be reading. Danielle Pafunda, now located in Wyoming, is bringing her fierce and feral feminist aesthetic to the foothills of the Rockies. Heidi Czerwiec, from North Dakota, is producing a saucy and elegant meta-poetic formalism, and Tiffany Midge, from Idaho, is creating sharply observant interrogations of pop culture and American Indian identity alternating with rich lyrics. Minnesota must-reads include Ed Bok Lee, Wang Ping, Kristin Naca, Matt Mauch, and Richard Robbins. And bringing it back home back to South Dakota, Christine Stewart’s powerful lyric meditations on mothered embodiment, as well as Patrick Hick’s moving chronicle of adopting his Korean-born son, are terrific. Finally, I’d like to give a shout out to my talented colleague at the University of South Dakota, Natanya Pulley, who writes outstanding memoir intersecting identity, family, and place, as well as poetry and innovative fiction. And I’d also like to mention Layli Long Soldier, who—although living and teaching in Arizona—has South Dakota roots, and writes powerful poems interrogating language and cultural identity.
UtSQ: Tell us about your first significant literary encounter. How did this experience inspire you, or shape you?
LAR: My father is also a writer, and so I grew up in a literary household, and I remember going to poetry readings at a very early age. I most likely heard Yusef Komunyakaa (who years later directed my M.F.A. thesis at Indiana University), then a student at Colorado, read at High Country Books in Laramie. Gary Snyder gave a reading at the University of Wyoming and came to dinner at our house. I had poems accepted to the Owen Wister Review when I was twelve or thirteen, and at the magazine launch, I shared a stage with other contributors and John Edgar Wideman, who was teaching at the University of Wyoming at the time. Although I eventually went to school to study piano performance at Indiana University, I realized in my mid-twenties, that writing formed my best self, and when I began to seriously write again, on my own terms, it was like coming home again.
UtSQ: I recently read your new book, Dandarians (Milkweed Editions 2014), and I was quite taken with the immediate and constant presence of nature in your work. This could be said about many writers, but I enjoyed the unique way you included and interpreted nature in your poetry. Much of your nature imagery in Dandarians is distorted and sometimes even grotesque; for example, this passage from “Trompe L’oeil: The Annotated Version”:
What gets buried. So many secretive tubers and roots, all simmering underground. They gestate, pulsate, and bulge, almost radioactive in their insistent tumescence—febrile root hairs whiplashing the homely earthworm-kissed faces of moles blindly tunneling by.
This book places much of its focus on culture-clashing and familial relationships. How do these dark images relate to your personal experience, and was it your intent to counterpoint a mainstream view of nature?
LAR: I definitely want to resist clichéd, bucolic representations of nature. I feel that nature is much more interesting, contradictory, feral, and surreal. And that “beauty” in nature, for me, only really emerges when in tension with these richly strange and complex contexts. People, too, are natural organisms with complex familial and cultural contexts, and for all of our self-consciousness and intellect, we sometimes act out in feral, violent, self-destructive ways. We all also carry, deep within us, powerfully instinctive fight or flight responses. And so to mirror/reflect or juxtapose dark or traumatic experiences with darkly strange images of nature makes a kind of larger sense to me, in that human nature is a form of and a part of nature as well.
UtSQ: One of the central themes of Dandarians is interpretation—of words, of course, as the title is an altered pronunciation of “dandelions,” but also how our differing interpretations of language can reach further to embrace a larger construct or definition. Your poem “Animoaney” is a wonderful example of this:
When my mother says the word anemone, as when she says the name of any flower, she says it like something perfect and beautiful in the mouth. Animoaney, she says. It begins like animosity, rhymes with alimony and acrimony. Exotic creature beckoning tentacles on the oceanic substrate. The moan in the name invoking a salt-bitten saturation of tears, sessility of the thing left behind. Acrimony like an acrid whiff of chlorine. The smell I come to think of as the sharp harpoon of shame.
What drove you to explore this compelling theme in your work? What other themes in Dandarians did you set out to specifically examine?
LAR: Ultimately, I see Dandarians as being a book about language—language as a(n impossible) form of desire, or yearning, to connect self with other. The slippery, mispronounced signifiers of my childhood, which I thought of as Word Betrayals, created a hybridized, imaginatively rich liminal linguistic space for me—full of marvelous connotative density and complex meaning. As with all hybrid, liminal spaces, this was also simultaneously a fraught and dangerous space. And so while all signifiers are, ultimately, slippery, and while language is a symbolic contract that will never represent the thing itself, I see this desire or yearning for connection/communication is hopeful, the materiality of this desire in language itself a thing of strange beauty, and the act of listening, reading, and receiving as an act of imaginative collaboration. All of the poems in this volume, in addition to the Word Betrayal pieces, reflect or engage in themes of communication, miscommunication, transmission, and reading/reception in one way or another: from the communicative biosemiotics of fireflies and cuttlefish, to reading the seasonal shifts of the Vermillion River as a kind of text, to the expressive performativity of gender, to dream poems as a communiqué from the unconscious, to the sexy siren song of moth pheromones.
UtSQ: What do you find exciting, hopeful, or promising about poetry right now?
LAR: I feel as if, stylistically, there’s such a wide range of aesthetic possibility open to poets writing right now. That the forms are fluid, genre-hybrid, and fascinatingly recombinatory. That poets have immense stylistic freedom to apply a wide palette of approaches and techniques to create ideal fit, tension, and interplay between form and content.
I also feel as if we are finally beginning to have seriously difficult conversations about hegemonic publishing practices and marginalized voices. The VIDA Count and the subsequent VIDA WOC Count have been crucial to raising awareness of and initiating conversations about marginalized voices, and poet-critics such as Timothy Yu or Haryette Mullen, to name a few, have been providing significant critical scaffolding with respect to issues such as cultural commodification/tokenism of POC voices and hegemonic exclusions of POC voices with respect to experimental poetry. I think these discussions are long overdue and—yes!—exciting, hopeful, and significantly promising for poetry.
UtSQ: Aside from writing, you are also the editor-in-chief of South Dakota Review. How long have you been with SDR? What is your favorite thing about being an editor? What is the most challenging aspect of editing a literary journal?
LAR: I’ve been working with South Dakota Review on and off since 2000, when I accepted my teaching position at the University of South Dakota. I served several stints as acting editor of the magazine, under the editorshop of Brian Bedard. When I took over the magazine in 2011, I made a commitment/mission to both aesthetic and cultural diversity. Every one of my issues so far has been gender balanced, and includes both writers of color and queer voices, with a wide spectrum of aesthetic approaches. It is a particular joy for me, as an editor, to assemble these heady, eclectic blends and enjoy the surprises of these very different voices sparking up against one another. The most challenging aspect of editing a literary journal, particularly a quarterly literary journal, is the unrelenting tide of the slush pile and, I feel, having to turn down high quality work by excellent writers due to issues of space and fit.
UtSQ: What’s next for you? Are you willing to share any details about your next project, be it a book, trying out that new restaurant, conquering the world?
LAR: I was very recently named the new Poet Laureate for the State of South Dakota, and so I’m very excited about this opportunity! I’ll be spending the next four years traveling throughout the state giving readings and workshops and fostering literary community, as well as collaborating on various literary projects.
In terms of my own writing, I’m currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Tsunami vs. The Fukushima 50, which is a project that emerged in response to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake/tsunami and subsequent Fukushima disaster in Japan. I wish to commemorate Fukushima, and focus public/cultural/artistic attention on Fukushima's ongoing legacies, particularly with respect to environmental crises. Within this project, I've turned to tropes of otherness/difference in tandem with questions of mutation and radioactivity employed within comic books (X-Men or Godzilla, for example) as a means of confronting issues raised by the Fukushima disaster. In addition to providing a vehicle by which to consider the ecocritical and cultural implications of the Fukushima disaster, this project has blossomed into a canvas that works with aspects of personal and cultural psychological trauma, gender performance and queer identities, the taboo of female rage, and ideas of the monstrous/grotesque.
UtSQ: Finally, Lee Ann, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, what would you talk about, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
LAR: I would love to have a meal with Geryon from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.
We’d order lychee martinis, sushi, and bouquets of uni (sea urchin) in ponzu sauce garnished with orchids.
It would be awkward, of course. Too introverted for extensive conversation, Geryon would be uncomfortably fidgeting his wings during dinner—intently photographing the waiters with his old school Leica as they moved back and forth through the blue skim and glow of the restaurant aquarium. But sometimes we’d shyly smile at each other. And after the first lychee martini, I might surreptitiously send him a text: a quail’s egg is a tiny sun sliding down the horizon of my throat.
Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of four volumes of poetry, the most recent of which, Dandarians, was released by Milkweed Editions in September 2014. Her second volume, Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press), was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and her first book, Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin Books), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The recipient of a 2003 Archibald Bush Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, she was also named the 2004 winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the 2001 winner of the Frederick Manfred Award for Best Creative Writing awarded by the Western Literature Association, and the 1995 winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize. Her short stories have been shortlisted as stories of note in the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and two of her essays have been shortlisted as essays of note for the Best American Essays anthology. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Roripaugh is currently a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where she serves as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review. She is also a faculty mentor for the University of Nebraska low-residency M.F.A. in Writing, and served as a 2012 Kundiman faculty mentor alongside Li-Young Lee and Srikanth Reddy.
