Dean Rader : part one

Dean Rader’s debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Three books appeared in 2017: Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon), Suture, collaborative poems written with Simone Muench (Black Lawrence Press); and Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements & Alexandra Teague (Beacon). Most recently, he co-edited They Said: Contemporary Collaborative Writing and Native Voices: Poems, Craft, and Conversations. Dean writes regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, BOMB, and The Kenyon Review. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

What are you working on?

Over the last two years, my poems seem to be grouping themselves in ways neither expected nor intentional. On one hand, I am writing poems I think of as largely political that take on controversial issues such as gun violence, race, and even climate change. A poem like “History,” which was published in the Kenyon Review Online not long after the Charlottesville riots, is a good example of this. Here, I’m looking both forward and backward; somewhere in the middle is my young son, who I seem always to be talking to about past and present transgressions.

On the complete other end of the spectrum is a relatively new poetic obsession—Cy Twombly. I have been writing short, almost minimalist poems in response to specific Twombly pieces. I am particularly attracted to his drawings and to the social and semiotic distinctions between drawing and writing. What does it mean to draw as opposed to write? What does it mean to make a mark on a canvas? Or a page? To paint a poem? To draw the letter e?

Somewhere between these two modes is another unexpected series—elegies for my late father who died in December of 2017. Even though he had not been well for most of the year, his death was sudden and, by all accounts, unexpected. I wrote about his illness for the first time in 2017. Bizarrely, he began dialysis the day of the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in England. Somehow public and private tragedies, local and global mourning, merged in the poem “Elegy Pantoum,” in which big questions seem to loop back on themselves.

So, what do these three interests have in common?

That is what I want to find out.

Somewhere is a through-line. Somehow, the Venn diagram of these concerns overlap and even inform the other. In some way, the endeavors of art in the face of loss spool shared threads. Many scholars and art critics have claimed Twombly’s drawings and paintings are elegies. Maybe my Twombly poems are elegies for our country; maybe the poems about the decline of our country are really elegies for my father; maybe the poems about my father are actually interventions on the ability of art to articulate anything at all.

Wow, that was a long answer. I am also working on an essay about a triple murder twenty years ago in India. I knew the victims and was with them not long before they died. It is, as you might imagine, very difficult to write.