DENISE DUHAMEL
Photo by Amira Hadla
Frances Richey
A Conversation with Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel is the author of 12 chapbooks and 17 full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which is Second Story (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Her other titles include Scald, Blowout, Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, and The Star-Spangled Banner. A proponent of literary collaboration, she and Maureen Seaton have co-authored five collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She co-edited (with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad) Saints of Hysteria: A Half- Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007).
Kinky (Duhamel’s poetry book that uses Barbie as a vehicle to explore feminism and consumerism) was published in 1997, and in March 2022 for its 25th anniversary, she co-edited with Dustin Brookshire an issue of Limp Wrist featuring poems about the doll. She also served as a guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013. Her work has been translated widely, the most recent volumes being Mundo Barbie (translated by Miriam Adelman, Julia Raiz, and Emanuela Siqueira, Edições Jabuticaba, São Paulo, Brazil) and Reina por un día (Queen for a Day) (translated by Rossana Alvarez, Ediciones Recovecos, Córdoba, Argentina). Denise Duhamel is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
This interview was conducted by phone on February 23, 2022.
Frances Richey: Vivian and I were so sorry to hear about your mom’s passing last July. When you sent those poems in September, we felt privileged that you would send them to us. Your submission was one of the last things we talked about before Vivian died in December.
Denise Duhamel: You know, when I sent those poems, I had no idea that Vivian would not be with us much longer . . . It’s a very strange feeling. I had this sense of connection with Vivian, even though we never met in person. I can be a wiseass sometimes in my writing, but I always felt like she got my most vulnerable poems.
Richey: I love all your poems in this issue, but I kept going back to “Baby Mouse,” and then, just last night, I read “Love Poem #11” from Second Story, and there were baby mice in your sock drawer. Duhamel: Oh, my goodness, that’s right, that’s right.
Richey: The mice in your poems are not the kind of mice you want to kill. You just want them to find another place to live.
Duhamel: In real life, I’m not a fan of mice. I don’t really want mice in my sock drawer, but in my poems, mice are so tender.
Richey: There are certain connections from book to book. When I read your poem “Terminal,” which gives the reader your grandnephews’ reactions to your mother’s death, in this issue of upstreet, it called to your poem “A Sestina of Grand Nephews” in Second Story, where all six boys, all under six, are playing on the beach. How old are they now?
Duhamel: Anywhere from five to eleven.
Richey: Eleven can be a dividing line . . .
Duhamel: Oh, yes. My soulful 11-year-old grandnephew is an Ed Sheeran fan. I like Sheeran, too. Very shortly after my mom died, Ed Sheeran released a song, “Visiting Hours,” about wishing he could visit someone who had passed. My grandnephew sent it to me. He’s a sensitive, wonderful kid.
Richey: Are you the favorite aunt?
Duhamel: Yes. (Or at least I hope so!) My sister and I are stepping into the role of matriarchy because we are the oldest women now in the family. So I’m almost like a second grandmother to him. My sister’s a year younger than I am, so we hang out all the time when I visit her in Massachusetts. We never had boys in my family. My sister and I were two girls, and then my sister had two girls, my nieces, so I didn’t know much about boy energy when my nieces had their kids.
Richey: I can relate. I had one idea about men before my son was born, and after he was born, it changed my perspective. Did it change your perspective on men to be with your grandnephews?
Duhamel: It really did. I have a lot more patience and empathy. It’s like you can kind of imagine men as children after seeing their vulnerability as boys.
Richey: You had told me that you studied with Jean Valentine. But you’re also influenced by Frank O’Hara. Their work couldn’t be more different. Would you talk about how those two poets have influenced you in your work right up to today?
Duhamel: Jean was a fabulous teacher and mentor. She and Jane Cooper, who retired my first semester at Sarah Lawrence, were my first two female writing teachers. As an undergrad at Emerson, I studied with all male creative writing teachers. And even Sarah Lawrence, where I received my MFA, at the time was all male except for Jean and Jane. It was a different world.
It’s a fool’s errand to try to emulate Jean Valentine. I don’t know anyone who can do it. She’s so beyond any school, or beyond any movement. She’s so singular a voice. In workshop, she’d say, “Maybe you could try this or that . . . but it’s your poem.” She never had that heavy hand in editing. It was a real gift. She let her students flourish in whatever direction they wanted to go. If I used pop culture in a poem, that was great. If someone did an Ashbury imitation, that was great. She was so well read, so almost ego-less. She loved all kinds of poetry. She had almost no bias. Everyone in my class was doing such different things in terms of gesture and form, and she was attentive to all of us. She was attentive but she wasn’t overbearing. I don’t remember her saying “should” or “get rid of this” ever. She was so gentle with our poems that we just felt that we could flourish. It was a very different workshop model. It was wonderful.
Richey: Was Jane the same way?
Duhamel: No. Jane Cooper marked up the poems a lot. She was great and had a very logical mind. I had spent fourth grade in a children’s hospital for severe asthma. It was a rough time, but it was also the time when I became a writer because I was in the hospital, and I couldn’t go outside and I was on breathing machines, and I read, read, read and wrote and wrote. I was 10. So I wrote a poem about that time in Jane’s class and wrote a line something like: “I didn’t have a sense of death” after one of the children in the children’s hospital died. Jane had been a child who’d been hospitalized, as well. And she said, “But you did have a sense of death.” And I said, “I don’t know if I did,” and she said, “Oh, believe me, you did.” I’m sure she was right. I don’t know what ever became of that poem. She would interrogate a poem in a very different way, word by word, syllable by syllable, where Jean was more floaty. Two very different ways of teaching, but both meaningful. Both amazing!
Richey: You were writing as a child in the hospital?
Duhamel: Yes. I wrote as a little girl, from 10 years old on. I didn’t know I could be a poet because I hadn’t read much poetry. I just knew Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and they were dead. So I figured all poets were dead. Even in high school, we had no study of poetry, so it wasn’t until college that I was exposed to contemporary poetry. I went to undergraduate at Emerson College. Tom Lux and Bill Knott were my two undergraduate influences. So I didn’t get to Jean and Jane until graduate school.
Richey: Do you remember any of the stories you wrote that year in the hospital when you were 10?
Duhamel: Yes! I wrote a story about a friend I made there with leukemia. He could barely walk in real life, but in my story he was a superhero who cured us all and busted us out in the middle of the night, so we never had to eat ham salad sandwiches again. (We had ham salad a lot for some reason and to this day I can’t stand it.)
Richey: When did you find Frank O’Hara?
Duhamel: I think I found him on my own, believe it or not. None of the poets I studied with were very much influenced by the New York School, but I just fell in love with Lunch Poems, and I thought, this is such a cool idea to write every day. I loved his freedom, pop culture and putting his friends’ names in his poems. So immediate. He was the first New York School poet I read, and then I came back to Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, and Ashbury to a lesser extent because he puzzled me so. Frank O’Hara—even when I didn’t get him, I felt like I got him.
Richey: Do you have a favorite Frank O’Hara poem?
Duhamel: Yes! “Having a Coke with You” is one of my favorite O’Hara poems. In it, he elevates the love poem to include that excitement of first meeting someone you know or hope is “the one,” and that exuberance of wanting to disclose everything you know. He has the romantic notion that sitting with someone you love is “more fun than” and goes on a worldwide tour, including an art museum. After he lists inventive locations (including where the two met), he has that exquisite ending—“which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it.” I modeled my poem “Having a Diet Coke with You” (from Blowout) on this poem.
Richey: What poets were your teachers in grad school influenced by? Duhamel: I hate to say this, but we were kind of left on our own. I don’t remember them bringing books into class or anything like that.
I think Jean liked Theodore Roethke. Tom Lux liked James Tate. Jane Cooper liked Auden. I also had a wonderful semester with Michael Burkard, who spoke of Robert Creeley and Tomas Tranströmer. It was such a different time. Now, I work so hard creating a syllabus and assignments for my students, but back then it was “bring in a poem each week,” and that was it.
Richey: With your own students, what poets do you bring into the classes you teach now?
Duhamel: I change it up every semester. We have a reading series at FIU, so whoever’s coming in, poetry-wise, I assign, because it’s so cool when students can meet a living poet. I can always find assignments about anybody, really. I like to teach David Trinidad because of the formal invention. He has so many sonic sounds and writes pantoums and villanelles, but they’re all based in pop culture, and my students seem to respond to him. I like teaching Dorianne Laux for a more emotional, meditative voice. I recently taught Rachel McKibbens. She’s published by Copper Canyon. She is a non-academic poet who owns a bar in upstate New York. She publishes in excellent magazines. I like to teach her because she writes about violence against women, mental illness, and also does some really fun, formally inventive poems. Jan Beatty is wonderful to teach. She uses a lot of slashes in prose poems and writes from an empowered female stance. I like teaching Terrance Hayes’s book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. It helps to teach a David Trinidad sonnet, which is metered, 10 syllables, perfect lines, and then Terrance Hayes’s sonnets, which are much looser in terms of syllable count, just to get students thinking about poetry in different ways. Dorianne Laux has a fabulous sonnet in Only As the Day Is Long. It’s a sonnet in which she uses all of John Donne’s end words from one of his sonnets. And then I have them do almost a golden shovel sonnet, just so they have some sense of the line and form. Oh, Patricia Smith. I love Patricia Smith. Especially Incendiary Art. And Blood Dazzler. I used Blood
Dazzler before Incendiary Art came out. I also bring in Sharon Olds, Maureen Seaton, Major Jackson, and Ada Limon.
Even though I don’t always write in form, I like teaching at least some kind of form, especially for undergrads. I want them to express themselves, which is great, but I try to take it up a notch, so they have a sense of poetry’s possibilities.
Richey: I just re-read Blowout, a stunning collection. You can see the divorce coming early, and the poems take the reader inside that marriage and inside that relationship, and then I think of poems like “Sleep Seeds,” which was one of my favorite poems of all the poems I read. A lot of writers might have those thoughts but might not write the poem down because they’d think people would find it gross. But as I was reading “Sleep Seeds,” I realized how much love it would take for a mother to lick her daughter’s eyelids after the child has slept to remove the “sleep seeds.” That poem and “Love Poem #11” in Second Story, after those wrenching poems of a marriage coming apart, gave me a deep sense of hope. What was the inspiration for “Sleep Seeds”?
Duhamel: I know this is a weird leap, but here goes. I read an article about long-tailed macaques who lick their baby’s eyes open when they are stuck together because of a cold or allergies. I just found the image so completely intimate and arresting!
Richey: Congratulations on your latest book, Second Story. It came out in 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic.
Duhamel: Thank you. I did a lot of Zoom readings. That was about all I could do. It’s been reviewed and it’s coming along nicely.
Richey: You mentioned with Frank O’Hara, using people’s names. When you use people’s names and your audience is going to know who you’re writing about, would you talk about how that is for you, the writer?
Duhamel: I think I was very naive when I first started writing because I had the idea that no one besides a few friends of mine would ever read any of my poems. Even today, I’m grateful for my readers; they’re mostly poetry people. I do get nervous once in a while, and if someone says, “Please don’t write about this,” I do not. We talk about this often in class because people are afraid to write about their moms or their dads or their boyfriends, so I tell them they can change the name. You don’t have to go Frank O’Hara and use the real name. You can also put a poem in a drawer, but it’s really important to write what you need to write and then figure out what’s going to happen with publication later. For Blowout it was a different situation because I was writing the poems as I was going through the breakup of the marriage. I just remember thinking, “I have to write these,” not thinking that they would ever be a book. When I was trying to put my book together, I worked with my friend Stephanie Strickland. She’s really good in terms of putting things in order, and I gave her, in retrospect, this very lackluster book, and she said, “What about this poem I saw in a magazine?” and “You mean you didn’t write anything else about the breakup of your marriage?” So I gave her all of those poems, and she said, “These have to be in the book, you knucklehead!” I scrubbed that book to remove names.
Richey: I’ve read “Congested” and “Plague Poem,” two poems that you collaborated on with Maureen Seaton, and I would have never known that they were collaborations if I hadn’t been told.
Duhamel: Thank you!
Richey: It seems to me that the chemistry between the two poets would have to be just right for a good collaboration.
Duhamel: I think that’s the most important thing, honestly.
Richey: How did you two get started?
Duhamel: I had gone to see David Trinidad, who I mentioned earlier. He was reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. I was living in New York at the time. I didn’t know him at all then. I went to listen to him because I was a fan. He read these great, hilarious poems, and then he said, “I have a chapbook of collaborative poetry with my friend, Bob Flanagan.” And suddenly this guy, Bob Flanagan, jumped on the stage, and they read these poems that were so different from what David was writing on his own. The collaborations were almost surreal. Very imagistic and wacky. I bought the chapbook, and I called Maureen and I said, “I don’t know what I just witnessed, but I think it was something amazing, and I think it’s something you and I should do.” I sent her the chapbook, and we started writing together. We would write one line at a time, leaving each other our lines on our answering machines, and sometimes Maureen would be calling from a pay phone, and the line would be all garbled, and I would just put it in the poem as I heard it, mistakes and all. One of our first poems we wrote together was “Eco-Feminism in the Year 2000,” in 1990. The year 2000 seemed really far away, and we didn’t even really understand what eco-feminism was. We’d just read an article on it, and we wrote the poem, and then we slowly kept writing and writing together. Then we would do exquisite corpse, folding the paper so we could only see half of each other’s lines. We did exquisite corpse sonnets and pantoums. She was the one who got me interested in writing in traditional form because she had studied with Marilyn Hacker, the great sonneteer. So Maureen was really in sonnet-land. She was horrified by my big prose blocks. We just did all these crazy experiments. It’s been a joy, and it continues to be a joy.
Richey: How long have you been collaborating? Duhamel: It’s been 30 years. How lucky am I?!?
Richey: Over the years, does the collaboration ebb and flow? Duhamel: When we first started collaborating, Maureen was a mom raising her children. She had set times when she could do it. Then I moved to Florida. Email made it a little bit easier. We would do lines back and forth by email. Right now, she’s undergoing treatment for cancer. So sometimes she has the energy, but other times not.
Richey: I’m so sorry.
Duhamel: Thank you. She’s such a sweetheart. I’m hoping when she’s better we’ll start writing again. It has been very ebb and flow. Collaborating with her has really been one of the joys of my life. To be friends and to be able to write the poems. I teach Maureen’s books a lot. Her book Sweet World came out in 2020. It’s about her cancer. I taught it, not sure how my students would respond. It turned out that one of my students had cancer, and another student’s mom had had cancer. It’s about having cancer and still loving the world. There are some very funny poems in there, too.
Richey: You had said about the collaboration that you were committed to writing accessible poems, and I was impressed by that because even poets who write accessible poems these days won’t always admit it.
Duhamel: It’s almost like accessibility is a slur. Some people think accessible means easy. And I think it’s the opposite. It takes work to provide clarity, and it’s not like that clarity comes in the first draft. There’s a certain attention that needs to be paid when you’re trying to be clear.
Richey: One of the poems I think about in Second Story as you’re saying that is “The Revolution, 2018.” I love the repetitions, all the details, the juxtapositions of things that no one else has put side by side. Lines like “Our revolution, Sister, will not be folded into the giant wings of a Victoria’s Secret model” juxtaposed with the line “Our revolution will not be soapy and feel-good like the ‘Real Women’ Dove Campaign”—just line after line from a speaker who is paying attention. And then going into the love poems. Not everybody can weave in so many different images and allusions that are just right for the poem and/or the book.
Duhamel: I remember, it might have been Jean, she said, “Trust your leaps! Trust your leaps! If you go there, the reader will go there with you.” And it’s true. If your mind goes from apple to Montana, there’s probably a reason. If you keep going, a pattern will emerge.
Richey: Could you give us a few lines from one of your favorite collaborative poems with Maureen?
Duhamel: Yes. Maureen has had a lifelong fascination with Olive Oyl, and her enthusiasm was contagious. Here is the first stanza of our sestina “Caprice”:
From the day she met you-know-who, Olive Oyl was tortured by spinach.
She’d made a thousand green soufflés before she gave the sap the boot,
whipping eggs with spinach, splashing everything with oil, Cold- Pressed and Virgin,
then sliding the pan into the oven with Popeye’s stern orders
to make it snappy. Why didn’t he like her honey-baked hams?
He preferred skinny
sausages, strung link to link like necklaces. Their lopsided kitchen was no haven . . .
Richey: Wow! That has to be so much fun! Do you have any rituals when you write? Like August Wilson said that he always washed his hands before he sat down to write. And someone else said that he puts on a hat and his boots when he writes. Do you have anything like that?
Duhamel: Nothing. I can write anywhere. Some people have special pens. I can type a poem; I can write a poem in a nice notebook; I can write a poem on the back of a receipt. It doesn’t matter. The one thing, though, is I try to write 10 minutes a day, no matter what. Even if I write, “I have nothing to say, I have nothing to say, I have nothing to say.” It’s almost a meditative practice. I just want to remember each day that I’m a writer, because it’s so easy to forget when you’re doing everything else. But that’s it. I don’t do anything else in terms of ritual.
Richey: So if you’re in the shower or you’re in a meeting or in the middle of a conversation, like you were in “A Different Story” (that is such a writer’s poem, by the way), if you possibly can you stop what you’re doing and get out of there so you can get the line down?
Duhamel: As I get older, I have to, or I’ll forget! I remember when I lived in New York, I would walk home, pre–cell phones, and it would be raining and I’d have my umbrella, and I’d say the line over and over and over in my head until I got home so I could write it down. But now, I don’t even know if I could say the line over and over. I’m so easily distracted. I might forget.
Richey: Do you carry a notebook and a pen with you at all times? Duhamel: I’ll have a pen, but sometimes not a notebook. I might write on the back of a bank envelope or napkin. I should be more diligent about notebooks. But I usually have something I can write on.
Richey: Do you think of yourself as a political poet?
Duhamel: I do. More and more. I really do. My latest poems in this issue of upstreet are about my mother and her death, but even as I write more about her, the poems will have political edge. I think of two of the last images she saw. She was in hospice, and on TV she saw the story about the Champlain Towers, that condo that collapsed in Florida on June 21. And I thought, “Why did she have to see that?” And then she saw the comedian Bill Cosby being released from jail on a technicality on June 30. She was pretty much gone at that point, but she came to for a minute and said, “That son of a bitch!” I said, “That’s my mom! Go Mom!” She lived through the insurrection at the Capital on January 6, watching it on TV in the nursing home. She said all the Alzheimer’s patients were crying and moaning. These moments and images may come into these next poems.
I grew up working class. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money, but I had a union job in a supermarket as a kid. I had a certain sense of fairness. Being a woman, putting that aside, I grew up thinking, “I can do what I want, and no one can stop me.” Now I think, “If I don’t speak up, why even write?” We’re at such an inflection point now, it’s impossible for me not to say something. It’s not an imperative for other poets, but it’s important for me.
Richey: As a white woman poet, how do you feel about writing poems that address race?
Duhamel: It’s so fraught. In Second Story I have a poem called “Beholden” about being a drunk college student in Boston, being stopped by the police. Nothing really happened to us. Looking back, I know that’s because I was white. Do I put it in or not? The Rodney King protest. I didn’t go. Should I put that in or not? This is going to sound like I’m the whitest person of all, but I was listening to Brené Brown. I got addicted to her during the pandemic. She’s very pop psychology. But one of the things she said was about speaking up. I think it is hard for women in general anyway, the “Should I say this? Should I not?” and always second-guessing ourselves. She said the definition of white privilege is having the luxury of not speaking up because heaven forbid you say the wrong thing. And I thought, “You know what? It’s probably true.” So what if I say the wrong thing? If I say something imperfectly, someone will correct me, and I won’t die. I don’t have to be completely defensive. I want to do no harm. The last thing I would ever want to do is harm someone through a poem. It’s a difficult, case-by-case basis, which feels like a very inadequate answer to your question, but I’m still thinking this one through. Because if you say nothing . . . I picture a hundred years from now, and the planet survives, someone’s reading a poetry book from 2021 or 2022, and there’s no mention of the climate crisis or the insurrection. I’m not saying as a poet or writer you have to engage with it fully, but it seems shortsighted to not at least consider our present moment.
Richey: How do you know when a poem is finished? Duhamel: I know because I cut out the last three lines.
Richey: [laughs]
Duhamel: I find that I tend to write beyond what I have to, and I have to cut back and end on an image or something that could suggest something more. It might have been Tom Lux who said that there are two ways to end a poem. One is to slam the door shut, and the other is to sneak backwards out of the room. I think slamming the door is the hard one. When it works it really works, but when it doesn’t, there’s no room for the reader anymore.
Richey: Someone wrote about one of your books that it’s like Frank O’Hara meets Lucille Ball. And someone else wrote you were a cross between Sharon Olds and Spalding Gray. I can see Sharon Olds. Your poems are visceral and fearless in that way, but why Spalding Gray?
Duhamel: It might have been that he told long-winded stories . . .
Richey: [laughs] I found this description of one of Gray’s monologues by Mark Russell: “One man piecing his life back together, one memory, one true thing at a time. Like all genius things, it was a simple idea turned on its axis to become absolutely fresh and radical.” And from Roger Rosenblatt, talking about Gray’s monologues: “And the one true heroic element in his makeup was the willingness to be open, rapidly open, about his confusions, his frailties.”
Gray himself in one monologue said he was an existentialist. Some people have referred to your work as existential. I think your Barbie poems are existential. So maybe Spalding Gray, in some ways, is a good fit. What do you think?
Duhamel: My friend took me to see Gray perform “Terrors of Pleasure” at Lincoln Center in the late 1980s. It was an expensive ticket—one I wouldn’t have been able to afford!—but her boyfriend couldn’t make it. I remember being transfixed by all his leaps. I didn’t ever consciously emulate him, though sometimes voices and styles just get through. I have been characterized as an ultra-talk poet, feminist poet, transgressive poet, New York School poet, and formal poet. I don’t feel more aligned with any one school more than another. I simply feel happy to be able to write what I need to write.
Richey: Getting back to your mom, was there a service where you were able to read a poem for her?
Duhamel: Not for my mom, unfortunately. Because of a strict priest at her Catholic church, they didn’t let anyone in our family do eulogies. But at my dad’s service in 2008, there was a kind priest, so my niece Kate (who is the mother of those little boys in the poem “Terminal”) and I wrote a Joe Brainard “I Remember” poem together. We were holding hands, and she said, “I remember when gramps used to do this,” and then I said, “I remembered when my father did that . . .” and we went back and forth, and it was beautiful. At my mom’s graveside, my nieces each read a poem. One of them read “I carry your heart with me,” the E. E. Cummings poem. It was lovely. I’m still angry about my mom’s service. It’s not that it was anti- poetry so much, but about not letting the family speak.
Richey: You have a poem called “Social Media,” and there’s a line in that poem: “despite all we’ve done, the world is still sweet.” And I think if I was going to put a headline, which we don’t do, for this conversation/interview, the headline would be: Despite All We’ve Done, The World Is Still Sweet. I think that headline encapsulates much of what runs through and underneath your work.
Duhamel: When you repeat those lines back to me, I’m realizing, this moment is so fraught—the cruelty, the despair, the violence, and it goes on and on—and yet, you see beautiful children, you see couples kissing, you see sweetness.
Richey: I enjoyed finding so many movies I’ve seen over the years in your poems. Did you go to see everything when you were growing up?
Duhamel: I used to sneak into movies I wasn’t supposed to see all the time.
Richey: You mean the ones you were too young to see? Do you remember which ones?
Duhamel: Yes. I have this cousin who’s 10 years older than I am, and he got me into The Exorcist. He made me promise not to tell my parents. I was brought up a strict Catholic, and The Exorcist was banned by the Church. My parents forbade me to see that movie. I thought it was because of the Catholic Church, but maybe it was because they knew how scary it was. I was a rebel. I was going to see it. Oh my God, I had nightmares for months. I was scared out of my mind. I couldn’t tell my mother. I’d wake up screaming, and she’d come in to ask what was wrong, and I’d say, “Nothing! It’s nothing. I’m okay.” I was probably 12 at the time. I had no business seeing that movie. I was way too young.
Richey: When did you come to a real understanding that there is evil in the world?
Duhamel: It was probably when I started reading about politics. My cousin was in Vietnam. I had a very strong sense of evil watching the war on TV. I remember the monk on fire, but it felt like evil was far away. And later, it was probably during the Reagan administration, I became much more aware, so maybe I was in college before the concept of evil really sank in. I knew people had mean parents, but true evil was more of a political awakening. I guess I’m lucky that I didn’t have a sense of evil in my childhood. My parents were solid.
Richey: Okay, this question has been with me since 1960, when I was 10 years old and I saw the movie The Time Machine, from the book by H. G. Wells. Rod Taylor played a Victorian English inventor who builds a time machine. He takes himself thousands of years into the future and when he gets out of the machine, he finds all these white, blond, beautiful people lying around in on the grassy bank of a rushing river. One person falls in, and no one moves an inch to save her, so he jumps in and saves her. He learns that these people above ground have no civilization, no value for life. And there are people below ground, called Morlocks, who keep the people above ground fed, and then eat them. The inventor gets close to the above-ground people, helps them vanquish the Morlocks, and starts teaching them about the past. In the end, he returns thousands of years back to his own time. His time machine lands in his old library, where he meets his closest friends and tells them of his discovery and that he’s going back to help these people in the future create a new civilization. He tells them he won’t be coming back again. After he’s gone, his maid turns to one of his gentleman friends and shows him that there are three books missing from the inventor’s library. The friend asks, which three books did he take? And she says, “I don’t know.” So my question is, which three books would you take if you were going into the future to help those people start a new civilization from scratch?
Duhamel: That’s a wild question, and I absolutely love it! I would take J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Phoniness versus authenticity, and what it is to be human. I probably would take Sharon Olds’s book Odes, all praise poems, and I might take this book I had as a little girl, A Child’s Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson. One of my favorite poems in there was “The Land of Counterpane.” It’s a poem about a child who’s sick in bed, creating a valley and whole worlds from his bed. The sheets and pillows are hills. Creating his own civilization!
©Copyright 2022 Frances Richey Reprinted from upstreet number eighteen (2022)
