Duke Poets Society: An Interview with Professor Joseph Donahue

Duke Poets Society: An interview with Professor Joseph Donahue, a current poet and English professor at Duke University. 

Professor Donahue has been with the English Department as a lecturer for over 14 years and specializes in teaching both the art of creating poetry and analysing and critiquing great poets’ works! This semester he is teaching English 220S: Introduction to the Writing of Poetry and English 390S-1: Special Topics in a Single American Author: Emily Dickinson. I was lucky enough to pick his brains on a wide range of poetry-related questions – everything from his “desert island” poet to his ideal writing spot! 

What is the earliest poem you remember reading? 

I think the one that made the most of an early dramatic impression on me, because I can't remember the earliest poems – that's in the fog of being a kid and would’ve been a child’s garden verses or something like that. But the earliest poem I really remember reading was in 8th grade. I read “Kubla Khan” by Coleridge. And I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. The moment I read those opening lines “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river ran…” I just was like, “Oh, what is this?” I would say that’s the first one that really impressed me or made an imaginative impression on me.  

What would be your biggest piece of advice to first-time writers? 

Well, the first thing I tell classes is it’s really about reading. You have to be a reader before you’re a writer and you have to read with a kind of intensity. You need to find works that you love and that impress you and you have to read them so much that they become a part of your nervous system. It’s about internalising verbal music. Imitation or some form of trying to catch the poetical music that excites you is how you learn to write. 

What is your ideal writing space? 

I have a room in my basement with all my books in it. I also like to sit in landscapes or in a natural setting but I don’t do it too much. In summer we go to Seattle, so I’ll take a notebook and go to this park that’s along the lake and the mountains, or I’ll read a bunch of Chinese poetry about mountains and lakes, and I’ll write like I’m a painter creating a scene. But basically, any place that’s quiet, and I have a notebook and a pen. And I will write into these notebooks and copy out anything interesting that is in there into a bigger bound art book. 

Is your process always the same? 

I am pretty well-suited to the process, and I have had the same process for most of my life. You are always shaping things and contriving pieces of realities that people wouldn’t think to write down and create magic in landscapes. 

How do you know a poem is “finished”? 

Yates has a line that finishing a poem feels like “clicking a box shut”. I do revise a lot of my poetry over the years sometimes, but there is a point. One sign is that it’s shorter than you think it is and you have compressed it. There is a sense of conclusion and that it is just done – it can be a very pleasant feeling. I don’t have any particular rule about it, but it is just a feeling that the poem is done. 

What poem had the biggest impact on you and why? 

I think I could maybe say Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl.” I was very young when I read it, and I think an interesting question is, “What can you still read at seventy that you read at seventeen, and what do you still admire?” Because a lot of work will therefore fall to the wayside. Ginsburg as a force and a poet made me in high school instantly think, “Oh, I’ll have what he’s having!” His publisher was arrested and put on trial for obscenity, and “Howl” was a highly revolutionary poem, but it had this amazing energy to it and it encodes all the lessons of being a poet. He runs through modern poetry, and it almost reads like a manual on how to write a poem.  

If you could only read one poet for the rest of your life who would it be? 

Ah, so this feels like a “desert island” poet! I think I would say William Blake. He’s not the poet I read the most often but there is a fullness to his work. He does everything from writing lyrics to hilarious satires. But he also writes about his own mythology, and his own kind of vision of the universe in the larger poems, which are profound and imaginative acts. I have read his work several times, and I will never get to the bottom of what he accomplished, but you have the sense that if you were stranded and you had a copy of Blake you’d be okay. He would be a friend to help you face death – you would have the terror and the wonder and the sublime and this hilarious satire all in one poet.