The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things: Q&A With Poet Sean Thomas Dougherty

Award-winning poet, Sean Thomas Dougherty, is the author of over fifteen books including The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018), All My People Are Elegies (NYQ 2019), and his newest poetry collection, The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things (Jacar Press, 2022). The poet, Dorianne Laux, called Dougherty the ‘gypsy punk heart of American poetry.’ Reginald Dwayne Betts called him a ‘poet of dirt and gravel,’ whose poems ‘are about the dirt, the place where we come and return.’ One of his places is Erie, Pennsylvania, where he lives and works as a caregiver and medical technician. I recently spoke with Dougherty about work, poetry, and their connection in his new book.

Salyer: I’m struck by the relationship between work and a sense of grace in your poems. In ‘When I listen,’ for example, you begin with music, the ‘mourning doves in a cathedral’s rafters’ and ‘piano riffs tender as old people / making love.’ The poem closes, though, with this admonition: ‘Do not forget / after someone dies, there is labor: / someone strips the bed. / Someone mops the floor.’ Why does the poem insist on this? What is lost by not seeing this labor?

Dougherty: I think what we lose is the continuum of labor and the living. Even at the moment of death a stranger goes to work. In many ways I think this is what poems do. Somewhere right now a stranger is getting to work, scribbling on a piece of paper the poem that will help us go on. There is more than a little Kabbalah in this. We don’t need to win the Pulitzer Prize, just one poem to save one life, to recognize one life, to witness one life. What is more righteous and humbler than that? ‘To be righteous in small ways,’ says the poem, says this labor. Who is not more righteous than that woman, an immigrant worker I’ve witnessed how many times, changing the sheets, sterilizing the bed. Because she must labor as we all must, wiping away the losses from this life to keep going in this life. If we do not acknowledge that labor, we dishonor the idea of the human being. We also dishonor the idea of the poem, which, in the end, is written in words and said with human breath. If we let the poem rise into the ethereal, far from the work that most humans on the planet do, then what is the poem but a trifle for the powerful, a moment of discussion from the salon, or a line on a resume for the talented ten percent?

Salyer: In the poem’s initial description of listening to Thelonious Monk, there’s the shift from ‘fear’ to ‘revere’ to ‘reverie.’ If the subject is improvisational, spontaneous, the means of description involve a good deal of craft – slant rhyme, etymologies, alliteration. I always liked that idea of the poet as someone who crafts – which I suppose isn’t very ethereal. How do you understand the labor of making poems? Are there times when you revel in making the work visible to readers? Times when you want to hide it more?

Dougherty: I love poems that show their architecture at times. In many ways the New York school poets do this, poets like O’Hara with his ars poetica of walking and his ‘I did this, I did that,’ as if the poem unfolds on the walk. More so a poet like Ron Padgett, his famous poem about ‘voice’ and hoping to never find it. I love ‘this poem’ poems like the great Ishmael Reed’s poem that goes ‘this poem, this poem, this poem,’ then swallows you whole. I love how poets like Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Jose Padua situate the poem in the act of writing, which is actually a move that places us into the actual creative act. But I also love a poet like Patricia Smith who hides her masterful meters without letting us see the seams. Poetry is labor, not just in the sense of mopping a floor, but labor the way a mathematician develops and proves a theorem, or an engineer designs a building, or a bomb maker figures out a fuse. And when it explodes, and everyone hits the floor, we are covered with blooms and Pinata toys. I believe that poems should be sublime but also at times terrifying. These are terrifying times.

Salyer: In a different vein, you have a remarkable series of prose poems that imagine responses to rejection letters from poetry editors. It strikes me that these poems are often about insisting on the fullness of life that poems on the page, at best, take the pulse of. What do these poems want ‘Dear Editor’ to know or hear?

Dougherty: I wrote that book in direct response to a preponderance of rejections. But it was also a way to use the actuality and metaphor of rejection to speak of the work I do as a long-time caregiver for folks with traumatic brain injuries. I think there is a parallel between the gatekeeping apparatus of art and the gatekeeping that keeps disabled folks from living to their full capabilities. We live in a culture where the disabled are underfunded, a culture that wants them unseen. In an odd way, those poems about rejections are about all of that, too. I also try to take the Editor’s point of view, to express the profound difficulty of saying ‘no’ to someone when so many voices need to be heard.

Salyer: Along those lines, so many of us who write and receive rejections are familiar with the language of poems being ‘almost’ or ‘coming close.’ It’s a language you pick up on, at turns, when you talk about ‘my people’s almost odes.’ An elegy, too, as in All My People are Elegies, is a kind of ‘almostness.’ I can’t help but sense tension between the elegiac desire of “almost” and the reciprocal desire in the idea that ‘The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things.’ How do we speak of those who are absent and simultaneously listen to them? Does poetry close that circuit or just map the problem?

Dougherty: This is going to sound crazy, but I think poetry and language said in specific ways can cross the veil. I am not alone in this obviously. Ask any seanchaí or shaman, the Kabbalists and the Sufis. What is this world but one world, and I don’t mean the pop culture metaverse, but I mean we are moments in time, grown in time, techno-logicians of time? And yet inside our brains, in our dreams, what is time? What is space? Have you ever dreamed a long dream, a dream that takes a day or more, and then you wake, and it has only taken two minutes? What is that? In the same way I think of poems as pieces of language that are trapped in time but can also resist it. Did you ever see that Sci Fi movie The Arrival, how with language one can change, see, transport through time and space? Is that really so farfetched? Haven’t we since the first human could speak tried to make magic with language? I think, at its spooky finest, the best poems do try to reach across that veil. On a less intellectual level, the idea of ‘the almost’ is part of the grain of working-class discourse. Every corner bar is filled with someone who almost made it, who could have played in the pros, who almost won the lottery if not for that one number. For the poet, that idea of ‘almost,’ of failure, is the song we want to sing. Maybe we are all victims of the Spectacular.

Salyer: I have sometimes tried to picture the ‘elsewhere’ of “we wish you luck in placing your work elsewhere,” just as I have tried to imagine my own ones among the dead in an elsewhere. And so much of the matter of life and work can seem like it happens in an elsewhere, a kind of nightshift of the heart, that happens behind the scenes. If you gave me a set of directions for driving to elsewhere, how would I know when I got there? How would I live there?

Dougherty: I love that phrase “nightshift of the heart.” The poet, Phil Metres, characterized my work as an aesthetic of the nightshift. For me, ‘elsewhere’ consists of spaces that the so-called normal world tries not to see, the world that doesn’t recognize the disabled and the ill, the world that warehouses the largest prison population in the history of the world. That is ‘elsewhere,’ the ‘elsewhere’ in rooms I enter to make sure a person is still breathing. The world of a bar where the lonely sit without anyone, but then someone walks in and says, ‘good to see ya.’ That’s the world I live in, one where men and women work long hours of shift work.

‘Elsewhere’ is also where our dead pass without fanfare or headlines, no parades. But there is another ‘elsewhere,’ too, right beside us, the elsewhere where our dead watch over us. They watch from beneath the oak tree or hover in the corner of a room. They remind me that history and armies mean little when the veil is lifted, the powerful lose their money, lose their tanks, and stand bewildered on the side of a hill, burning, as the Sufis say, with the fire they have brought inside them.

What do you see in your dreams? ‘Elsewhere’ is never far away, though we may be people who live far from the centers of power, scribbling away, making our maps to show the way for others, our maps of poems.