Luke Rolfes: It is a treat to talk today with Dan Albergotti about his new collection of poetry from LSU Press entitled Candy. I really dig this book, Dan. It’s a fascinating and meditative journey that touches on a variety of subjects from gun violence to musical history to the lifecycle of nature to a reimagining of ancient stories. Yet, despite its wide scope, the book never seems to lose its center.
Dan Albergotti: Thank you, Luke. It’s a pleasure to talk with you about the book, and I appreciate your kind words about it.
LR: Your inspiration for this book is varied. You pull back from prehistoric times to modern day controversies. Is there a common theme or thread that you can identify that served as inspiration for Candy? And how long has it been in the works?
DA: Well, one explanation for how varied the inspiration seems is that I never write poems with a unified book project in mind. I always just write poems as they come to me and assemble the collections later. I remember hearing Natasha Trethewey years ago say that poets should “honor their obsessions” (that is, should return to themes that demand their attention without self-consciousness or the concern that they might be “repeating themselves”). I have fully embraced that. So if there is ever a “common theme of thread” in my books, it’s the result of my obsessive return to themes that have always haunted me: family, transience/permanence, the search for something beyond the void, the seemingly redemptive nature of art, etc. All that makes it hard to say how long the book has been in the works, but since there were ten years between my second full-length collection, Millennial Teeth, and Candy let’s say a decade.
LR: Was it easy or difficult to cull poems for this book? Did you have to make any tough cuts?
DA: Perhaps because I never work from a project, I always struggle to attain the distance necessary to see what poems might need to be shed from a manuscript. When I finally arrange the poems in a way that makes some sort of sense, I’m tempted to pronounce the book “done” and walk away. That’s where a trusted reader really helps. I received a couple of very careful readings of an early version of the manuscript from poet friends, and those helped me see issues of order much more clearly. I didn’t have to cut many poems in the end, and in fact one reader helpful suggested a few additions of uncollected poems they knew of that I had originally chosen to leave out.
LR: Can you tell us a bit about process and form? You write in triplets and quatrains often in this manuscript. Some of the poems are one long stanza, as well. Do you have specific form in mind when you begin a poem? And how do you go about determining what form the poem takes on the page, the length of line/stanza, etc.?
DA: This is a great question, but one I find terribly difficult to answer. It might sound coy for someone like me, who uses and manipulates a lot of received forms, to say that I don’t think of form first. But it’s true. I almost always have the image, the language, the idea first. It’s never “I want to write a sestina—what would be a good topic?” The idea for the poem “The Beetles” existed a long time before I cast it into the abecedarian form. But to be fair, I did have in mind that I’d like to write a straight abecedarian at some point, as I had already written a reverse and a double in that form. (I’m a completist, I guess!) I hope this makes sense. I always sound like I’m equivocating when I talk form/content.
I’ll add that I go back and forth between formal structures and free verse all the time. In my first book, The Boatloads, all the poems are free verse. In the second, Millennial Teeth, about three quarters of them are, at least in some sense, formal verse. And in Candy, the majority are free verse. (Of course, “free” verse is never really free from form. As T. S. Eliot once said, “There is no freedom in art.”)
LR: Specific instances of gun violence show themselves several times in this book. A few contemporary writers I’ve talked to say it’s a difficult thing—writing about crisis that is still very present and fresh—yet you do it with authority and grace. Can you tell us about navigating crises in your work?
DA: I was the poetry editor of The Greensboro Review in the fall of 2001, and within a week of the 9/11 terrorist attacks our office was receiving poems about that event submitted for publication. People turn to poetry in response to crisis and trauma, as we all know. But those poems were also universally terrible. It is difficult to write about crises that are, as you say, “very present and fresh.” But the difficulty doesn’t diminish the urge to respond. I guess one way to get around that difficulty is to find a way not to approach the subject too directly. Somewhere in Nine Gates Jane Hirshfield says, “A poem stalks its subject.” I think that becomes more important the more difficult the subject is. Maybe my approach in “Brayer,” with its focus on social media scrolling and a noisy mule, is an example of this “stalking” of the subject. It doesn’t announce its central concern of gun violence in line one.
LR: One more broad question. I love your ability to leap: past, present, the ancient, the current, the biblical, the cosmos, the prehistoric, from cities to countries, from humans to animals, from music to philosophy to memory. Are these leaps something that comes organically to your poems, or is it something you consciously encourage yourself to do?
DA: As a reader, I’ve always loved juxtaposition, digression, and radical leaps. The way Jack Gilbert can crush ten disparate things into a fifteen-line poem and make it seem perfectly natural. The way David Kirby can go on five major digressions in a poem and somehow bring everything back together perfectly in the end. I think I’m just emulating what I love as a reader. I can’t say for sure how conscious any of it is. I certainly don’t outline the idea for such leaps, though I will admit that, especially for longer poems, I will sometimes have notes about how widely divergent things could be brought into association before I’m in the drafting process.
LR: Candy is broken into three numbered sections, yet one poem—“A Kick in the Jaw”—appears outside the sections, almost as an introduction to what comes next. What led you to break this book into sections? Why did you want this poem to appear outside that organization?
DA: When I was younger, I thought I didn’t like sections in poetry books. Maybe it was because I love Gilbert’s books so much—just one poem after another, unrelenting until the end. I think I romanticized that approach as some sort of “unvarnished purity.” Then I tried to assemble my first full-length manuscript and, like so many others, found the task of ordering the poems enormously vexing. When I finally gave up on the idea of the non-sectioned book, it made seeing potential organization of the manuscript much easier. All three of my full-lengths have been organized in three parts. In the first book, The Boatloads, I also used an initial poem standing outside of section one. I thought of that poem serving as something of a hint of the themes and structure that was to come. I’ve returned to that idea with “Kick in the Jaw” in Candy.
LR: I’m curious about the title of the book. You mention in the notes that the lead singer of Joy Division, Ian Curtis, had a dog named Candy. You reference Candy in the poem “On Listening to ‘Atmosphere’ One More Time.,” and how somebody had to take Candy in after Curtis took his own life. What made you decide to call this collection Candy? Is the book simply named after Curtis’ dog, or do you see the title as a broader idea? Is it both?
DA: The story of Ian Curtis’s dog is even a little sadder than that, actually. Candy was relocated by Ian Curtis’s estranged wife Deborah shortly before his suicide, not after. The available biographical information doesn’t make it clear whether she consulted him or not, but she likely did not. He loved that dog, even carried a photograph of her in his wallet, so I can’t imagine that he would have been happy about her being given away to strangers. I don’t know that I can give you or anyone else a rational answer as to why I chose to title the book as I did. But the moment I put that title on the manuscript, I knew it was right.
By the way, someone who wrote a blurb for the book told me in an email that “Candy” is “a completely surprising name for this collection, until that amazing reveal, after which it is a completely perfect name for this collection.” That was gratifying! I hope other readers might agree with him.
LR: Let’s discuss a few pieces in detail. I was intrigued by “The Servant’s Ear,” a lyrical poem that dramatizes a biblical story about a man losing his ear, and then later, in the gospel of Luke, the ear is replaced. What inspired you to reimagine this story in your own words?
DA: Well, I’ve always been fascinated by the small discrepancies in the gospels. For example, while all four of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) mention that two thieves were crucified along with Jesus, only Luke tells the story of one of the thieves being kind to Jesus and then being promised heavenly reward. The other three specifically say that both of the thieves hurled curses at Jesus, not just one. (Here I have to give a hat tip to Samuel Beckett, who cites this discrepancy in Waiting for Godot.) Similarly, all four gospels note that a servant to one of the priests had his ear cut off by one of Jesus’s disciples during the arrest in Gethsemane, but only Luke says that Jesus healed the servant’s ear (miraculously reattaching it to his head, one would assume). I think if you asked an average Christian what happened in those moments of Jesus’s life, you’d probably get Luke’s versions in response—even though 75% of the biblical record tells another story in each case. I think that Luke’s stories are more memorable precisely because they offer more hope—suggesting that salvation and healing might always be possible. Of course, he might have been a more “creative” writer than the other three—maybe one who knew what kinds of stories sell.
Anyway, to answer your question more directly, I guess my fascination with those discrepancies—with the difficulty of getting to the truth of anything in the past—led me to dwell upon that story and to imagine the ear lying in that garden for decades before Luke’s imagination returns it to the servant’s head.
LR: I love “Earth Shovel.” In it, the speaker views our planet broadly, from a variety of vantage points, and discusses how humanity always tends to take the most myopic view of our importance in the universe. The speaker laments the American public’s wanting to drill without hesitation into the earth’s surface. And then the poem ends with a friend’s new baby. Can you talk about how this poem switches between lenses, how you move from the macroscopic to the micro?
DA: I’ve been kind of obsessed with geological/astronomical perspective since I first discovered Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” in his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden. (I think I specifically refer to it twice in this book!) Sagan presented this “scale model” of time in that book—all we know (or knew then) of time from astronomy, geology, anthropology, etc. represented as a single year. The scale is roughly 14 billion to 1. On that Cosmic Calendar, Earth doesn’t form until mid-September, and the first primates don’t show up until the morning of December 30! The last two thousand years—what we call “A.D.” or the “Common Era”—take up the final four seconds of December 31. From a cosmic perspective, then, human history occurs in the blink of an eye. Yet we tell ourselves we’re the center of the universe.
But of course art is an attempt to transcend our limitations, to overcome our failings. To juxtapose the macro and micro perspectives does not, in my view, diminish even more the single human life. On the contrary, it elevates it. In that poem, the baby at the end means everything. Everything.
LR: Another poem I was drawn to was called “Appetite,” which narrates the mating cycle of a luna moth. The poem is simple in its subject and biological focus, yet the actions of the moth seem a stark contrast to our existence as humans. What can you tell us about this one? Is much of this poem’s meaning in the subtext?
DA: I guess I have a thing for responding to scientific knowledge, huh? The origin of this poem was my learning that the luna moth—after its life as a hungry, hungry caterpillar eating everything it can for a month and then building it cocoon for a three-week transformative sleep—emerges from the cocoon in its final form with only a vestigial mouth. It literally cannot nourish itself and will die about a week later from starvation. Its only purpose after emergence is procreation, for which it also has a driving appetite. These moths’ lives are so ephemeral, yet each one is exquisitely beautiful. I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts one summer years ago, and there was a large luna moth, nearly the size of my hand, on the wall outside my studio one night, perfectly still, seemingly worshipping the light bulb next to the door. I must have taken twenty or thirty pictures of it. It felt like a visitation.
Again, I guess I’m drawn to that collision of the macro and the micro—the grand, inescapable biological truth of the moth’s ephemerality contrasted with the otherworldly beauty of the individual in the moment. More than anything, I guess I wanted to honor that individual moth’s life with this poem.
LR: The longest poem in Candy is “I Listened to the Song ‘I Watched the Film The Song Remains the Same.’” This poem is one that gains momentum as it pushes forward through the topics of poetry, philosophy, art, life and death, violence, civil rights, and more. The poem, to my ear, reaches a crescendo when the speaker takes us through several harrowing scenarios of “you don’t just die from X until you do.” There is a rawness to this piece that I love—how it seems to, at times, show itself in the way a person’s voice will crack when they reach the part of the memory that hurts them the most. What can you tell us about this one and its construction?
DA: I wrote that poem at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the fall of 2020. I was lucky enough to have a six-month residency there, and I’m not sure I could have written that poem under any other circumstances. I don’t know that I can say anything very coherent about its construction, except that it happened in pieces and developed a momentum in my head as I began to see how those pieces spoke to each other. I also remember feeling a bizarre mixture of confidence and doubt during its drafting. During one of the moments of extreme doubt, I made this post on my Facebook page: “Observation: Eight pages into the draft of a poem that will certainly be 10+ pages when finished, the passing thought ‘every bit of this might be terrible’ is not a morale booster.” But after I finished the draft, I shared it with a trusted reader who immediately declared it the best poem I’d ever written. Maybe a lesson in pushing through self-doubt there?
I appreciate your kind words about the poem, Luke—especially the idea that it approaches those moments when the voice cracks in memory. That’s always an aspiration in my work.
LR: Finally, I’m curious about the last poem—the playful “Suspense.” The final image you give readers is of prehistoric insects frozen in amber. How they sit there on the shelf, frozen in time, waiting to see how the story ends. What led you to leave the readers with this image? And does this poem seem to speak, in some way, to “A Kick in the Jaw”?
DA: I guess this goes back to my obsession with geological time and humankind’s relative infancy. I had read a story from 2012 about the discovery of the oldest insects that had been found preserved in amber—two mites and a fly from the Triassic period, found in Italy. Scientists determined that they were 230 million years old. For reference, modern humans (homo sapiens) have existed for about 300,000 years. Crocodiles, pretty much in the same form as the ones we live with today, date back to around 100 million years ago. We’ve occupied the planet for such a short amount of time relative to other creatures. And other creatures mostly suffer for our presence. I had in mind the viewpoint of those other creatures—both present and prehistoric—as they watch us bring an end to Earth’s story. How uplifting, eh?!
Looking back on my answers to your questions, I think it all boils down to my being more drawn to nonhuman perspectives than to human ones. I find more poetry there.
LR: What’s next for you and your work? Any new projects on the horizon?
DA: I have a set of poems finished that I’m pleased with, enough to begin thinking about how they’ll work together in a fourth full-length manuscript. I have a tentative title, but so tentative that I can’t bring myself to share it publicly. And I’m pretty sure that a poem nearly as long as “I Listened to the Song . . .” will be its closer. Hopefully, I’ll have that manuscript completed in the next year.
LR: This is such a strong book, Dan. Thanks so much for sharing your time and thoughts with us today.
Check out Candy: https://lsupress.org/9780807182543/candy/
DA: Thank you, Luke, for your careful reading and excellent questions. If every reader were as diligent as you, poetry’s future would be a lot brighter!