ORDINARY ENTANGLEMENT: An Interview with Melissa Dickey
Kristen Tetzman: Hello Melissa, thank you so much for your time. It was wonderful to hear you read aloud in October for the CSU Poetry Center’s Lighthouse Reading Series. To start off, I would love to ask what are some books, art works, albums, meals, tree species, etc. that are moving you these days?
Melissa Dickey: Hi! Thank you! Okay, some books I read and loved recently: Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman, Free Clean Fill Dirt by Caryl Pagel, Impersonal Rainbow and the Bisexual Purge by Paul Killebrew, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Couplets by Maggie Millner, The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison. Art: from my visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art, I remember the John Rogers Cox paintings, and Alice Neel’s, and Monet’s purples. I’m lucky to live near MassMoca, and I like to visit the James Turrell light rooms and C.A.V.U.—huge works you sit inside. Music: Kelsey Lu. I appreciate all the orange in the trees.
KT: Those are some incredible writers. I’m also a sucker for almost all tree-related phenomena. After reading your book, I can’t imagine a better title for it than Ordinary Entanglement. What led you to land on it as the amalgamation of the work?
MD: For a while I was calling it Ordinary Time, but that felt too religious, and I was raised Catholic so that phrase had this particular resonance for me which had nothing to do with the book itself. Then, in 2019, Deerfield Academy hosted a TedX event they called Entanglement, and I read some poems there and thought the idea of entanglement really fit with my writing of that time. So I combined the two. I agree with you—in a way it’s a weird, clunky phrase in the mouth, but to me it describes the form and the content of this book very accurately.
KT: One of the first things I noticed was the cover of the book itself. It’s a map drawn by children, spanning at least four sheets of paper all taped together. Various destinations and details of the map include “jungle of misery,” “chasm of death,” “plates of woe,” and “boring old desert.” You thank your children for using their artwork in the acknowledgements. Can you tell me more about what this map means to you?
MD: Oh gosh. I don’t know how to describe this but I will try. I guess one way is: my four kids are in this book as they are in my life, and the book happens all around my life, and this map was on the floor of my life (our dining room/their project area) for a long time, like months. And sometimes it would get folded up and tucked away but it would end up back on the floor, the centerpiece for various elaborate games which I didn’t understand and wasn’t allowed to be privy to. My children have their own private culture which they protect, and yet they’d leave this record of it present on the floor. So the map really feels like the book to me. A few important details: the map is actually 34 pieces of scratch paper taped together and written on in pencil. It’s filthy from all the drawing and erasing and how it was on the floor for months.
KT: Thank you for sharing that. It’s so special. From personal conversation and details in the collection, it sounds like you’ve traveled a lot in your life. So far, I’ve heard about New Orleans, Alaska, Massachusetts, and Seattle. Can you expand more on what it means to be “a citizen of the world and also / this room.”
MD: Good question. I’m from New Orleans, my husband is from Alaska and grew up in Seattle; we now live in Western Massachusetts. We like to visit our families every year, but our aforementioned four children makes this prospect expensive (too expensive to fly). So we take very long drives across the country. We did this in the summer of 2017, and it felt important to reconnect somehow with the U.S. at that time. I was so angry with people who voted for Trump, including some of my extended family, for their willingness to excuse his racism and misogyny, among other things. And at that time, 2016–2018 or so, it was so easy to be angry with everyone else and avoid looking within, but there was also this call I felt, to look hard at my own internalized hierarchies, injustices, complacencies. I wanted to model action for my kids, so we did some outward-facing gestures like marching and canvassing and contacting elected officials. But the harder, much deeper stuff lived inside me, and I could see it playing out in my home and in my relationships.
KT: It seems to be one of the hardest things for many of us: to look within and address our own faults. Thank you for saying that. You’d said in your reading that the book is meant to be read quickly, can you talk more about that? In one poem you write “Don’t give up punctuation / one professor said / without thinking carefully about what you lose” (one of my favorites lines). How did the lack of punctuation impact the poems while writing them?
MD: Yes, well, leave it to Bob Hass to say one of your favorite lines. : )
Especially the first section reads quickly and tumbles along, those unpunctuated tercets, and when I found that form it excited me so much. I felt like I could say what I needed to say within it; I could combine phrases, imagery, and ideas in a new way. Prior to that I had written mostly discrete, compressed lyric poems that fit on one page. I had no idea I could write longer poems; it had always been a struggle to eke out every word and then arrange them. But this form had an energy to it, and that’s what makes it feel quick to me. No punctuation needed—I could use the line and the space between stanzas, and it’s perfectly acceptable if phrases get mashed together and mean different things when they’re next to each other; that was part of the discovery. To me, the lack of punctuation adds to the accreting effect, the pile-up.
KT: I couldn’t agree more, especially with your tight, deliberate syntax throughout. It’s impressive that you’re able to build such a strong sense of continuity while balancing the verses with a natural sense of contemplation and empathy. An example that caught my attention was “an ant turn one / small circle to follow / a path that only it can smell // and still no thing / touches what I know I feel / no thing touching me.” Pages later we see, “I could do almost / nothing to make him // love me less almost / nothing almost Nothing can / touch this I said.” Did you have a process for organizing and calling back to prior thoughts? Were there any challenges in developing this collection?
MD: That ant is a record of the practice that my dear mentor and teacher Rick Kenney taught me when I was just a little twenty-year-old poet: the practice of observation and note-taking. Twenty years of doing that now—I usually work from notes. I am not making stuff up. I saw that ant. I said that sentence. And because I’m me (or anyone) I have patterns around what I notice, and through this process of observing, note-taking, and writing poems out of notes—I mean literally I have pages of hand-written notes copied from notebooks and kept in a physical folder, and I use them to put poems together. So that’s the process part. But the patterning is more mysterious. There’s an intuition to it that I trust, and a music to the repetition. I always read my work aloud while writing. Some challenges: How do you know when to stop? Where does one end and another begin? What do you do with all the unused notes?
KT: Thank you for those questions. During your reading, you’d said you wrote these poems a few years ago. So as my final question for you, I thought I’d ask if you could give us a hint about some things you are working on these days?
MD: Relationships, the complications of loving multiple people, teenage girlhood: those are the recurring topics these days, the focus of a manuscript or two. I’m also writing lyric essays, some of which use the structure and symbology of the tarot.
Kristen Tetzmann is a poet and painter from Wisconsin. She received her BA in Art Therapy and Creative Writing from Mount Mary University. She is an editorial assistant at the CSU Poetry Center and a first-year poetry candidate in the NEOMFA program. Her work has appeared in Bodega Magazine, Furrow, Respect Your Mother, and elsewhere. She knows how to say “watermelon” in twenty-six languages.
Melissa Dickey is the author of Ordinary Entanglement (CSU Poetry Center, 2023), two previous books of poetry: Dragons and The Lily Will, and her poetry and essays have appeared in Bennington Review, New Orleans Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and the anthology The Anatomy of Silence, among other places. Born and raised in New Orleans, she currently lives in Western Massachusetts with her partner and their four children. She teaches literature and writing at an independent high school.