In the following email interview, poet Dobby Gibson talks about his fifth collection of poems, Hold Everything (paperback, Kindle), including how one was inspired by a famous club where royalty used to appear.
Photo Credit: Zoe Prinds-Flash
To begin, is there a theme that connects the poems in Hold Everything?
I hope the book’s title can be read at least a couple of different ways: As an announcement of breaking news, and as an invitation to take an inventory. Those are my major concerns here. I’m holding my ear to the wall and listening to the strange sounds of our present moment: its urgencies and bizarre simultaneities. At the same time, I’m trying to account for how I arrived here — in this particular time, in these poems — which is equally as mysterious to me.
So, did you start out with this theme in mind, or did the theme emerge as you were putting this collection together?
I don’t start with themes. To be totally honest, I don’t like the word “themes.” It gives me the heebie-jeebies of a 10th grade English class quiz. I wake up and write a poem. Then, I wake up the next day and write a poem. Over years of doing this, the poems begin to share ideas as they reveal the shape of a book, which I can then write the final poems necessary to complete.
The poems in Hold Everything seem to be free verse, or at least not rigidly structured. What is it about this form, of lack of it, that just works best for what you’re trying to express?
As soon as you break a line, you’re making a form. Actually, you don’t even have to break a line. Metaphor is a form. It’s a pair of images or ideas that conceptually rhyme.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t see form as a prerequisite for content. Poems don’t begin with something the poet is “trying to express,” which they then pour into a form, like slag into a mold. A poem begins with an encounter with language, and that encounter builds the arena of form necessary to contain it. This book’s forms include linked haiku and a longer sequence of American sonnets. Whenever I have attempted to begin a poem by pre-selecting a traditional form for no other reason than to execute it — today I shall write a sestina — the result has been a disaster. Like gymnastics compulsories, they become horribly predictable.
Hold Everything is your fifth collection of poems after Polar, Skirmish, It Becomes You, and Little Glass Planet. Are there any writers — poets or not — who had a big influence on the poems in Hold Everything, individually or collectively, but who were not as much of an influence on the poems in those previous books?
Oh, for sure. The American sonnets in this book wouldn’t have existed without the work of Wanda Coleman, Terrance Hayes, Gerald Stern, and Diane Seuss. The somatic exercise I developed to write those poems was inspired by the thinking of CAConrad. Reading the 810 haikus in Richard Wright’s This Other World, alongside my longtime favorite Issa, fueled a linked haiku that appears in the first section.
What about non-literary influences; were any poems in Hold Everything influenced by, say, visual art, song lyrics, or something else? Because the press release your publisher sent me for Hold Everything mentions “1980s hair metal gods.”
For me, non-literary influences are just as exciting as literary ones, and probably more generative. You would only have to scan the proper nouns that appear in the book: David Lee Roth, tiny hotel soaps, First Avenue, Julie Mehretu, gingko trees, etc.
Now that I think about it, there are a lot of flowers in this book. At the nadir of 2020, I saw a tweet that said something like, “Well, maybe now poets will finally stop writing about flowers.” I took that as a dare. Why can’t a flower be an interlocutor for state-sanctioned violence? What can the ginkgo tree in my front yard teach me about what I might owe the world?
Along with mentioning “1980s hair metal gods,” the press release for Hold Everything also has a quote from poet and poetry critic Stephanie Burt, who says you have, “a beautiful voice.” So, I have to ask, how many poems in Hold Everything were influenced by ’80s pop singer Debbie Gibson, who was not metal but did have big hair back then?
Only in my dreams.
[groans] Okay, I asked for that. And now I’m going to rescind my question about Dobby The House Elf from Harry Potter.
Anyway, back when I wrote poetry, in the 1980s, I would often workshop stuff by going to open mics. Do you do that as well?
I came to poetry relatively late in life — I was in my late 20s when I started writing poems, and 35 by the time my first book came out. By then, I had already aged out of the slam and open-mic thing. I know some incredibly great poets who spent their formative years in those scenes, but the contest-style format never would have worked for me, personally. I’m just as often interested in unsettling an audience, or exploring something curious, as I am with crowd-pleasing.
Some of the poems in Hold Everything were previously published in such journals as American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. But are the versions of those poems in Hold Everything the same as they were in those journals?
Most of the poems in this book appeared somewhere else first, and of those poems, nearly all were changed in some way during the editing of the final collection. There are poems in each of my books that I would change even now if I were able to. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” Paul Valéry famously said. That’s true for me.
So, is there anything else people need to know about Hold Everything?
I hand-drew the stars that form the section breaks in the book. Each star holds the name of someone or something that was important to the book. The visual reference here is to the exterior of First Avenue & 7th Street Entry, the music club in Minneapolis that Prince and The Replacements made famous. There’s a poem in the book, too, called “First Avenue.” I had this notion that a book of poems could serve as a kind of club. One where everyone is welcome and anything might happen. One where the past and future are always collapsing back into the present. A place where we can create an alternate reality free of everything holding us back.
Finally, if someone enjoys Hold Everything, and it’s the first book of your poems they’ve read, which of your previous collections would you suggest they pick up next?
Start anywhere. My books are all interconnected. I’m making a life by making poetry; and I’m making poetry to create a life. This is my one and only project, and it is going to take me the rest of my life to complete it.
