Dorsey Craft : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

I often return to Sharon Olds when I’m generating ideas for new work. I teach Odes in my Intro to Poetry course, but Stag’s Leap and The Father really expanded my definition of what I could say or talk about in a poem when I was just starting to write. The confidence she has in her voice and her form can be very freeing when I’m sitting down to write.

Dorsey Craft : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve been reading some great debuts lately. The speaker of Marianne Chan’s All Heathens explores Christianity, colonialism, travel with a stunning empathy and charm. Nicole Stockburger’s Nowhere Beulah has a quiet longing and demands to be read outdoors. I’ve also recently enjoyed Kate Gaskin’s Forever War, Jim Whiteside’s Writing Your Name on the Glass, Jose Hernandez Diaz’s The Fire Eater, and Tanya Grae’s Undoll.

Dorsey Craft : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Revision. Looking back at my own work makes me feel so vulnerable, especially since I often write a poem and (foolishly, brazenly) send it out to a magazine that same day. So I’m sheepish about going back in, which is almost always what the poem needs. I someday want to become one of those people that cannot stop revising and take years with a single poem, but right now I am taking baby steps. I change one or two words in a sitting. I try to make myself give poems time to marinate and feel less like mine.

Dorsey Craft : part two

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

My husband, who is an engineer and a totally science/math-oriented person, is often my first reader. His perspective is always really fresh and I can actually “read” his reactions better than anyone else’s and tell what he wants from the poem. After Kyle, I circulate it with a small group of poets. Eleanor Boudreau, Josh Wild, Marianne Chan, Lee Patterson, and Tanya Grae have been holding a Sunday poetry breakfast for a few years that I just got involved with last summer. The last couple of weeks we’ve reinvigorated poetry breakfast via Zoom, and it has really gotten my newer work off the ground. I also swap poems with Alexa Doran. We share the same obsession with euphony, so she always has great suggestions for the language.

Dorsey Craft : part one

Dorsey Craft’s debut collection, Plunder (Bauhan 2020), won the 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She is also the author of a chapbook, The Pirate Anne Bonny Dances the Tarantella (CutBank 2020). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Greensboro Review, Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review, Thrush Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She lives in Lake City, Florida and serves as a poetry editor for Southeast Review.

What are you working on?

I’ve been writing poems about the mourning dove. It’s a cliché kind of bird, but I love the way that it pops up in literature and mythology. I grew up hunting doves, so I paid a lot attention to the way they fly, the shape their bodies make in the sky, what they sound like, and I’m interested in writing poems that put that experience in conversation with the dove as archetype. I was talking to my writing group on Zoom recently and we agreed that the quarantine feels like it’s coming into the poems no matter what.