Dante, Dream Work, and The Unconscious in Poetry Book Development

An interview with poet Deborah DeNicola about her seventh book, The Impossible

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing poet Deborah DeNicola about the development of her seventh book, The Impossible.

Deborah DeNicola’s latest book is The Impossible; Kelsay Books. Previous collections are Original Human, and Where Divinity Begins, the chapbook Inside Light from Finishing Line Press, two award-winning chapbooks, Psyche Revisited, Embers Journal Press, Harmony of the Next, Riverstone Chapbook Award and her memoir, The Future That Brought Her Here. Deborah compiled and edited Orpheus & Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology. She has been a recipient of a NEA Fellowship.

We discussed:

- Where poem and book ideas start—in the poet’s unconscious

- Integrating poems of loss and grief with poems of love and celebration

- The influence of Dante’s Inferno and Jung’s “Sacred Abyss”

- How dreams can be a source for poetry

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview in text. To hear Deborah read poems from Impossible, check out the video.

Dante, Dream Work, and The Unconscious in Poetry Book Development

[Interview edited for clarity.]

Radha Marcum: Today we're discussing your seventh book, The impossible—where that book started and how it developed. Deborah, would you mind sharing a little bit about the process of developing the poems for this book?

Deborah DeNicola: I was working towards this book for about eight years. It changed a lot over that time. The center section in the book is a sequence of 21 poems about my father's death and afterlife. At the time that I wrote those poems, I was teaching Dante's Inferno. My father died of an overdose of drugs. I do believe there's an afterlife, in our energy field, and so the poems imagine taking him through [the journey of] not knowing that he was dead, having a lot of regrets, and eventually redeeming himself.

I was also dealing with my mother dying. I was her caretaker. Poems came naturally over those years. So this book became about my father and my mother—a sad story, but I didn't want the book to be totally sad because I was healing, making my peace with my parents. I also was working with some love poems about loss of love. The whole book is about loss. As I was putting it together, I wondered, how do I work all these poems in together?

My solution was to have sections of love poems and spiritual poems that balance the other two sections about my parents.

Radha: It sounds like you were deliberate in changing the tone from section to section.

Deborah: Yes. There were different tones. Some poems are celebratory, about loving the earth and loving life, and that had to mix with very painful poems, especially those about my mother who I observed for five years losing herself. I wasn't deliberate in putting it together [from the beginning]. For a long time I was unconsciously working on it, I think.  

[When I was ready to put it together] my process was to put the poems all over the floor and walk around them, to try to see which first lines and last lines went together, to try to find an order. I also discovered that I use the word “sky” a lot.

The title poem, “The impossible” is about a short story by Chekhov. It really has nothing to do with my family life or my personal emotions. But, I had taught that story and I always felt a lot of empathy for the characters in the story. The book had a couple of different names over time. I realized “The impossible” fit other poems too, because certainly my father's afterlife was somewhat impossible and having the stamina to observe my mother and living through that seemed impossible. So, it has different levels of meaning.

I think it was Carolyn Forché that suggested we find words that you use the most, and then to sprinkle them around the book as a way to hold it. And so “sky” is throughout the book.

Radha: Sky is an interesting motif because, as you mentioned, you were also in dialogue with Dante's Inferno, which is a descent underground. Can you say more about being in dialogue with the Inferno?

Deborah: I think there's an archetypal “sacred abyss” in in Jungian language. There’s a process of that most of us go through—a midlife crisis or a life change punctuated by periods of darkness. Themes like crossing the water, descending into the bowels of something, having to struggle with it and fight your way back. The hero or heroine comes back up to the surface with new knowledge for having been down below. Dante surfaces in Purgatorio and Paradiso. I use the sky to symbolize my father's healing.

Radha: You mentioned that you are a certified dream coach and that dream imagery often makes its way into your palms. Can you say a little bit about that that territory, working with dream material in poems?

Deborah: I record my dreams. For a while, I had a tape recorder next to my bed, and I didn't even have to open my eyes to tell my dream. That was a very rich time for me. I had like six dreams a week. Like the abyss and the sky … one of the ways I look at dreams is that there's always dark and light, a place where the most tension is, and where you're more comforted. In your projections, everything in your dream is you, so you are feeling your way through those images and, the postures of the other figures, the landscape, the tone and the colors. The dream allows you to experience different subjectivities.

The goal in working with dreams is to bring all of those things together, to feel them all together. It's balancing. Often a new image will come up in the process. [Working with the dream] you use active imagination, because you're revisiting the dream, but it's not exactly the dream. And it's not exactly reality. When you’re in that kind of slow brain state and things happen.

Radha: It strikes me how similar working with dream material is to what we poets do on the page. We bring many disparate, contradictory, contrasting elements into one space in order to make a new whole. It’s integrative. That kind of dream work sounds like a powerful practice for poets.

Deborah: It really does lead to ideas and writing. I actually have a book of essays about working with dreams available on Amazon.

Radha: A wonderful resource! I’ll link to it in the interview notes. Thinking back to the nuts and bolts of the book, you mentioned that you took a number of years to complete the book. It is very, very common for poets to take 5, 10, even 20 years to put together a manuscript. How was the process for this book different compared to the others?

Deborah: Some of my previous books had more conscious shaping. I knew where I was going with them. I worked on a book for 10 years after getting my MFA. The manuscript I had leaving the program went through many, many, many changes. But I think it is always problematic to try to see how everything's going to fit [while you’re in the process of writing and revising]. But over time you can feel you know more about what you're doing.  

The poems I'm writing now are post-apocalyptic sort of poems. Of course, we've all been reading Corona poems for two years. Hopefully that we'll get beyond that now.

Radha: Well, whether we’re feeling the losses suffered over the last two years, or the ordinary losses of loved ones—the inevitable losses that we all feel—I want to recommend your book. Do you have any advice for poets who are developing manuscripts? Anything that you wish you'd known earlier?

Deborah: I value other poets. Read, read, read. And don't be afraid of what comes up. Put yourself out there. If you have a conscious idea [for the book], then fine, go for it. But don't limit yourself to that idea because something else might occur to you. Things turn into other things.

In poetry, we talk about “the turn,” in writing. Suddenly there's a turn, and that's often where the poem picks up steam. I think Naomi Shihab Nye said, “You want to write a poem about going to church, but the poem wants to take you to the dog races. Follow where the poem wants to take you.”

Follow your unconscious. The unconscious is telling you things that you didn't know you knew.

Learn more about Deborah’s books and work at intuitivegateways.com/books-excerpts.