This week in Vintage Fringe, we’re featuring “No Translation” and five more poems by Rachel Dacus that originally appeared in Fringe Issue 4. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips caught up with Dacus by email over the Thanksgiving holiday to discuss ecopoetry, the practice of keeping one’s mouth shut, and Dacus’s “square poems.”

It’s been over three years since your work appeared in Fringe. Looking back on the poems, do any new ideas about them occur to you?

I still like the box format of the poems—I use it to compose in and then sometimes break up a poem into lines. More often, I leave the dense square of text as is. I think it encourages focus and enables ambiguity and resonance in the writing. While I don’t like to leave out punctuation in order to do this, I find the square shape—neither a lineated poem nor a paragraph—makes the reading slower, which is nice for poetry.

When I first read these  “square poems,” I loved the way the syntax and imagery, within the defined shape of the poem, and seemed to open up experiences of landscape. For instance, the beginning of “Poem to Save Your Life”:

                                                         Sung by a gnat
          who lands  on  the  under-carriage  moments
          after the metal thunder. Rant of chlorophyll
          leaving the reddened leaf. 

The poems are clearly allowing for an amplification and for remembering of those experiences. How does the “natural world” inform your work now? Would you place yourself under the umbrella of ecopoetics?

I would indeed place myself under that umbrella, though I don’t really know what ecopoetics means. I am hopeful that it can mean poetry bringing greater awareness to the fact that this is a living planet we trod, not a collection of dead materials to be quarried, mined, used, discarded randomly and without thought, and its evolutionary processes disregarded in favor of the needs of the “manmade” world.

A little bird tells us that “For a Day of Silence” was probably written on account of the spiritual teacher Avatar Meher Baba, who was silent for 44 years, and whose followers observe silence every July 10. How do you feel your own spirituality or spiritual path and your writing interact?

The little bird is quite right, the poem was written to celebrate Meher Baba’s 44 years of silence, surely an amazing act on the part of any human being, and one to make us all thoughtful about how we use speech, especially in poetry. I like to think that poetry is the closest speech there is to silence. Maybe just a whim of mine, but because of its refusal to remain within the bounds of logic—of the yes-no, black-white categories of thought—poetry and silence can teach us better how to speak to one another. The poem is in part about that. Meher Baba said, “Things that are real are given and received in silence.”

My spirituality hopefully informs all my writing. Sometimes when I try to write a “spiritual” poem, I feel it’s a dismal failure. Message can’t drive poetry, it must bleed through like a painting underneath a painting that begins to show itself when the patina of the newer work wears thin. I try to write with a spiritual attitude toward life, and then let what comes, come. The poems I think of as my most spiritual might not actually be seen that way by others.

In 2007, your chapbook Another Circle of Delight appeared. How did you like the experience of putting together a chapbook manuscript as opposed to a full-length book of poems? Were there challenges that seemed unique to a shorter collection?

A chap is so much more amenable to unity and thematic tightness. Not that Another Circle of Delight was put together that way, but I am working on a chapbook manuscript that will have thematic unity, and because there are fewer poems in a chap, you have more scope, oddly, to do that. A shorter collection needs to have the poems speak to each other without breaks or shifts, I think, to have that kind of unity. Otherwise, it just looks like, “Well, here are my 30 most recent good poems.”

What are you working on most recently?

I’ve just finished a new full-length manuscript entitled Gods of Water and Air, and I’m very excited about seeking a publisher for that. Hopefully, in a contest format, as I’ve never done that before.

Best of luck! And thanks for your thoughts.

Readers, Babel Fruit included a few of the poems that appear in Another Circle of Delight in their Winter 08/09 issue. Worth a look!