Name: Nik De Dominic
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Current city: Los Angeles, CA
Occupation: Assistant Professor, The Writing Program, University of Southern California
Age: 38
What does poetry mean to you?
Well, this question is much harder than the first five. Simply, a lot? It's still a weird thing, to say I'm a poet. Art and art making, I guess, I have guilt about. To make is to be selfish. To navel gaze. There's better shit I should be doing? I know it's not that simple, but I do certainly feel that way at times. Brendan Lorber, a poet, recently posted on Facebook, accompanying a recent publication of his poems: Have you ever traced the dark voyage of a person’s face as you tell them you’re a poet? It’s like saying you’re an alchemist or a wizard.
And I've always had difficulty both identifying as a poet and making poetry, partly because of that mystic-ness, other worldliness, and because of that, well, it's just not a thing people do. Too, its definition—what is poetry, what is a poem—is hard, slippery. Recently, Kaveh Akbar tweeted this: “If someone hands me a bag of dirt and tells me it’s a poem, it gets to be a poem. It might not be a poem that satisfies me intellectually or brings me any delight, I may not want to spend much time with it, but it’s a poem because the person who built it called it a poem.” And yes, I buy that; however, one of the snarky replies I saw was how absurd that definition is, that fiction writers don't run around calling donuts short stories. Do we need a definition? Is it ok that the definition shifts from poet to poet? Yes! Of course. For me, I look back on my 15 years of poems, and they are me figuring, figuring my self out on the page. They are a place to explore. What's that fancy word, interrogate? Yes, that, interrogate the self. And like through language and shit.
What is you favorite poem? Who is your favorite poet?
Both, too, are hard to answer. All of them? Like except the bad ones? I have been returning to Linda Gregg's work after her passing. There, yes, here, a favorite poem and a favorite poet:
Elegance
(as republished by Poetry Foundation)
By Linda Gregg
All that is uncared for.
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.
Why do you like this poem?
I think Gregg can help me with my shoddy definition above— that what poetry is and what it means:
Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing…
That is what I want from my work, all work. This is a poem.