Cass Donish Transforms Grief and Loss Into Poetry in “Your Dazzling Death” [INTERVIEW]

Cass: ”I was working on some of these poems before Kelly passed away, and they underwent pretty radical revisions in the aftermath. There are also many new poems that I wrote while processing my grief. The influence of Marosa di Giorgio’s book was quite accidental. I had spent so much time with it, and one day, the phrase ‘your dazzling death’ from that first section you read just popped into my head. It resonated with my experience of overwhelming, stunning grief. So, I turned to that first page, started writing a poem from it, and suddenly found myself immersed in a project where I was working with the entire text, reworking it, and telling my story through her text in an intertextual way. But it wasn’t something I initially intended; I kind of fell into it, and it became the central section of the book, with poems on either side of it.”

James: The word ‘dazzle’ finds its way into multiple poems throughout the collection, and it’s such a striking title for the book. The fact that it pulls from this other poem, I think, will encourage a lot of readers to seek out the source text. I originally found pieces of it on Google Books and had to track down the whole thing through a reseller.

Cass: “It’s a wonderful source text. I also ended up getting in touch with Jeannine Marie Pitas, the translator of that text, since Marosa Di Giorgio has passed away but the translator is still active in the literary world. We started a correspondence, and she read what I was working on, which was really special. It was a very intimate way to discuss the work, especially translating poetry.”

James: I’ve had a couple of my poems translated into Italian because my in-laws are Italian, and I wanted them to read it in a language they’re more familiar with. Translating poetry is a very specialized skill because it’s not just a literal translation. You have to translate the poetry, which may end up changing things. I wish I spoke the native language of the author so that I could experience the differences between the two; it would have been fascinating.

Cass: “The interesting thing about working with ‘The History of Violets’ is that the text isn’t actually about a single person’s death. It’s a very haunted, strange text, but it doesn’t revolve around the story of one person’s death. That part is mine. I took that text, which has a tone that resonated with my grief, and told a story about my traumatic loss, using this text and writing my story through it.”

James: Having read the book that inspired yours, they are very different yet they interleave in a way that’s truly extraordinary.

Cass: “Yes, I think it’s important to understand that I didn’t transform a text about one person’s death into a story about another’s. Instead, I took a text that felt like it had a tone I connected with in my grief, which wasn’t specifically about a single person or loss. I ended up telling the story about this traumatic loss I experienced using this text and writing my story through it.”

James: In the poem “Sitting in Again Park, Columbia, Missouri” you write:

I can't look everywhere. We moved in
and toward
each other, but now that life

is suspended
in sugar water, 
in forever, in smoky quartz—

Your collection explores the profound grief from the death of your partner Kelly Caldwell from so many angles. What role did capturing your experience in poetry play in the grieving process?

Cass: “I think because I’ve been writing all my life, it’s just part of the way that I process any experience. It just feels like the writing was one among many different practices, and all of them feel kind of interrelated with my own grief experience. I took a lot of walks, I lit a lot of candles, I had an altar, I was in therapy, I had a support group, and then I had writing. All of them were working together to help me stay in this world, stay on this Earth, and stay in my body and survive the experience of traumatic loss. I don’t think I really was writing with intention or focus for the first year. But I would, you know, jot things down here and there as one does, and when I went back, I saw that there were fragments of ideas there, and I started working on it more, maybe in the second year. So yeah, but I think I’ve always processed the world through language. The poems in each book are reflecting the experiences I was having at the time, not necessarily always in a direct way, sometimes in experimental ways or whatever poetry I’m interested in at that time, whatever modes I’m practicing at that time. But it’s kind of a way of transforming my experiences and making them into art, making them into something that includes my agency, you know, because I think that’s what creative practice really is. It’s a way of exploring our own agency, in this kind of just wild life that is very confusing and overwhelming and scary. And so I think creative practice is one of those spaces where we can feel that we have some power. So, I think that’s what this was doing for me with my grief.”

James: I had an experience when I was 10 in Boston, where I was mugged, hand over the mouth, pulled into a subway station—terrifying. I parked that trauma away for a lot of years, didn’t really remember a lot of the details, and then it felt like it had to be expressed through poetry. I was able to almost have an out-of-body experience, view it from different lenses, and from what it felt like on the inside and capture it. It’s totally changed that memory now; it was a very difficult thing to remember. But I also now feel like I created this thing that people can relate to. It changed that experience and places it differently in my head now. It’s really fascinating, I think, how you view the world through a different lens when you start building the craft of poetry.

Cass: Absolutely. I just received this beautiful email yesterday that made me weep, from a stranger who had read my book. She is someone who had experienced suicide loss in her own life and she’s queer. She wrote to me about her life and about how much reading my book meant to her. It was a really well-written, beautiful letter. I just thought to myself, you know, this is why I wrote this book, so that something terrible that I experienced could go out into the world as this piece of art that I made. These poems that I constructed could touch someone really far away who needed those words and who had been through something similar. And then that came back to me in this beautiful message and I was just crying because it was very moving and it felt like the work had found its way to someone who really needed that.”

James: The core of your book is an extraordinary palimpsest anchored on “The History of Violets” by Marosa di Georgio. To help listeners visualize the experience of reading this series of poems, excerpts from “The History of Violets” are effaced and embedded in your poetry. 

The opening poem in this sequence, “Kelly in Violet” includes [NOTE: effaced words are in boldface below but are in light gray in the book]: 

And the next morning, lying in a bed, slips of paper floating, names and numbers strewn. Your exquisite voice everywhere, and nausea setting in. Tiny violets in the yard, hard as a nipple, hard as lead.

You—

                          dazzling—

        dead.

Talk about discovering Giorgio’s book as the vehicle for constructing “Kelly in Violet”, and how you approached finding the poetry between Giorgio’s words. 

Cass: “The history of ‘Violets’ is about 30 sections long, and it’s a prose poem sequence. Initially, the phrases I borrowed from her weren’t in gray; I was just working with the language of each section and trying to make it reflect my experience of Kelly’s death and the aftermath. Marosa di Giorgio’s work helped me access the state of mind I was in because of the psychological resonances in her piece, and her focus on objects. I was very focused on objects around me as grounding elements in my grief experience—things like crystals, candles, flowers, soft blankets, or my cats. They really held me in place and helped me maintain a physical existence.

“There are so many interesting objects in her piece, and I started altering her lists of objects to reflect those that were around me. After working on that first section, I thought, ‘What if I try another section?’ So, I copied and pasted all the sections into a document and started messing around with the language, remembering things that had happened. Intertextual writing felt like having a companion text that enables you to do something you never would have otherwise.

“I ended up writing through the entire text of ‘The History of Violets,’ leaving out maybe one or two sections. I changed the spacing, added space here and there, so it doesn’t look exactly like hers. I revised it again and again, asking people to read it and give me feedback. It was especially strange, and I often asked, ‘What am I even doing? Does this make sense? Can I do this? Am I allowed to use another writer’s work in this way?’ I also contacted Jeannine, the translator, which was an interesting part of the process. Later, I went back and carefully went through her text, trying different visual styles like bolding, and figuring out which phrases were from her and which were mine. I then changed the font and color of the phrases I borrowed, revising from there to see on the page the balance of what was mine and what was not. I continued to mold it more and more so that it would become more distinctly in my own voice.”

James: “Anticipation of Spring” is one of several poems that includes imagined conversations and experiences that continue beyond death. The poem begins:

There's something about hunger I wanted to tell you
It's impossible to know who belongs to the lake
Until it's drained
Admittedly a swim was desirable and I undressed
Admittedly I went too far
I've been minding the mourning fires
For nearly a year now say it time has ended

My wife went through many months of grieving after her father passed away a couple of years ago, finding his presence in the most unexpected moments and places. How did crafting these poems amplify the memory of your partner?

Cass: “I think that when you’re writing to someone who has passed, it’s like you’re calling them back to you, and it’s like they’re not gone. When you say ‘you’ in a poem to someone who’s not there, then suddenly there they are. I think that’s the nature of a conversation, right? If you say ‘you,’ then you’re imagining that someone can hear you. And if they can hear you, that means they’re near you—near enough to hear your voice or read the word on the page. So, I do think that when I was writing, I would often enter a kind of state of calm and feel like Kelly was with me. It’s a really strange thing, actually, because grief can be so overwhelming and it just kind of takes over your body and your existence. And yet, sometimes, to get away from grief, I would start to write about what I was going through, and that would almost calm me again, maybe because of what we were talking about earlier about having some agency over an experience when you’re writing about it or when you’re doing something creative. I think there’s a way that we can invoke those who are gone and still carry them with us by speaking to them. I think a lot of people decide to stop speaking to people who are gone, and then it feels like they’re further away. It becomes harder when you try to speak to them again. You know, I have that sometimes with people I’ve lost, where if I haven’t talked to them in a while, and then I talk to them again, it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, hi. I know, I haven’t said hi in a minute, you know?’ I think writing about her has really kept her very close to me.”

James: Your partner Kelly Caldwell’s book “Letters to Forget” was published posthumously with your book and includes a moving collection of prose poems in the form of letters addressed to you. In one she wrote:

Oh no we’re not enemies, I protest. Put dust on the wound. Put rot in the fence. Put sun and tar on the roof. Put makeup on my face, put mud in my eyes, draw black lines on their edges, until my eyes are visible. Whether I am a man a woman an animal no longer matters, so long as the burden is off my back. Unbearable, the body. Unamended, the speech. Unlearning, the letter.

Share what you learned about your partner from these series of poems addressed to you, and the role poetry played in your relationship. 

Cass: “Those poems that are scattered throughout the book are titled ‘Dear C.’ and, you know, there’s a way in which I don’t even really think of them as letters to me because they’re poems. I mean, she constructed them as letters to me, but at this point, I feel like they are letters to the reader of her book, and I hope that they speak to people other than me. They were always poems, she called them letter poems, and at first they didn’t have the ‘Dear C.’ at the top, but she added it later to make them feel more personal. It was a creative construction. Kelly was working on that manuscript from around 2017 to 2018, so about a year or two, basically two years before she passed. I had given her feedback on it several times; it had changed a lot. Then she considered it finished and was sending it out to presses for publication for about a year, a year and a half maybe before she died. One of the things I really wanted to do was get it published for her.

“I do consider my book and her book to be completely separate, independent collections, even though Knopf designed these beautiful covers that link them, both of which use Kelly’s sketches, actually tattoo sketches she was designing. The covers are linked through their design because there are so many poems in the books to each other. But it’s interesting because that’s not how they would have come out if Kelly were alive. If Kelly were alive and we both had books coming out, even if there were poems to each other, because we were a couple, we would have never had the two books designed together and narratively wrapped into a pair. And in a way, that is something that happened because of her death, which is strange. But I definitely want to encourage people to read them separately or together, but they’re not a collaboration or written as companion pieces or anything like that. In fact, they are completely different books, and most of mine was composed after she had passed. So, yeah, it’s been something I’ve been really grateful for to have books coming out. And I think they feel more separate to me than they kind of appear because of how they came out together.”

James: “The Question of Surviving This” so effectively makes use of word placement on the page and enjambment, so that the reader is compelled to slow down and linger on phrases. You write:

My grief has no witness,
a quartz in a quarantine,
                hard and common

as enforced social distance.
The rain is fearful,
                expressionless.

How do you approach the visual design of your poetry? 

Cass: “I’ve always liked playing with space on the page in my poems. I think of a comma, an em dash, a line break, and an indentation all as these different types of pauses—these different types of breath. Some of it is intuitive, but then I think you find forms, such as those poems in the book that are all called ‘The Question of Surviving This.’ Once I found the form that it would take on the page, then I was able to reproduce that again in the other poems because the spacing made sense for the kinds of pauses that I was after. I think of these different types of pauses in poetry as very psychological and also sound-based. You know, the feeling of moving across the page and the feeling of breaking a line, they’re all different ways that we kind of go—maybe not audibly when we’re reading, but it’s like this relationship between the eye, the breath, and sound, and pause.

“I’m kind of obsessive about spacing and moving things just right. When my publisher was sending me proofs, sometimes with those poems, it was a little bit tough because I would say, could you add three more spaces? And can you move this over just so it aligns with the ‘our’ that’s above it in the other line, you know, just wanting it to appear in this very particular way that feels important to the poem and important to the way that a reader might see it, and then read it, and the rhythm of it. I think those ways of moving things around on the page affect the rhythm when I’m reading them back to myself.”

James: Your poem “A Year” opens with: 

When you died
the walls of our house
disintegrated

and all the handles
rattled and crashed
to the floor.

A gasp rushed
into the walls, adding air
with nowhere to go.

I was particularly impacted by this poem, how precisely it was crafted. What is your approach to the editing process? What role does critique play in your writing?

Cass: “That’s an interesting question. Especially with this book. I’m thinking about how when I gave this work to some of my closest, oldest poet friends, it was a little bit hard for people to give me critical feedback in the usual way, because they had seen me go through this experience. I think they just wanted to honor the work and the grief and the poems I was writing. So, I had to ask them a couple of times, ‘Please, please, I’m really trying to write a book. Please tell me what you think.’ And then they did. But with this book, it’s almost harder to remember certain moments because the fog of grief is part of what I was experiencing during some of the writing.

“I’m thinking about that poem you were just reading from, called ‘A Year’, which was about the time around the first anniversary. That was a horrible time. Everything was really heightened. All the grief I had been experiencing that first year was very strong, and I needed a lot of support around that time, which is completely common for death anniversaries, especially the first. In grief circles, people talk all the time about the support that’s needed around them. I did get support around then, and after that, things kind of shifted in a positive way after the anniversary passed. After I felt that I was through that first year, I had a sense of, ‘Wow, I made it through the hardest year of my life.’ But that poem, I think it came out of a notebook. I had most of it in a notebook, and then I typed it out and did some editing on it, but it already had the shape and the feeling and tone that it has in the book.”

James: Yeah, I think that you raised a really interesting point there that for poems that are extremely personal, the people critiquing your poem may hold back if they understand the connection to you personally, you almost have to push them to say, “I need you to critique the poetry, not the context of the poet.’ At the end of the day, it still has to be poetry, and I’ve attended open mics where there are inevitably some poets who are just really just expelling rage or grief just to get it out there but the actual thing that they’re communicating standalone, you would say that’s not there yet and it’s really difficult to provide that feedback at the end of an open mic. After an open mic people will sk ‘What did you think of this?’ and it’s really hard to say, ‘Well, that was compelling but I don’t know if it’s quite a poem yet.’ It’s really hard to say that, so I can hear what you’re saying.

Cass: “I really appreciate those friendships so much where we’re able to do both, you know, witness each other and support each other. But then also, when it’s time to have a conversation about the artistic practice, get into the meat of it.”

James: We’re in a time where trans people in particular are being vilified for political gain in many parts of the country. Poetry can be such a powerful vehicle for creating emotional connections and empathy. A poem can communicate so much in just a few minutes. Who are some of the queer and especially trans poets that you recommend listeners discover? 

Cass: Let’s see. I absolutely love the book ‘R E D’ by Chase Berggrun. That’s a book I have taught several times. It’s an erasure of ‘Dracula,’ and it’s kind of a reclaiming of femininity and agency and blood—amazing book. I also love K. Ivers’ book ‘Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco,’ which in a way, I think, is one of the books that I think of as the closest to my book because of the subject matter. It’s also about grieving the death by suicide of someone who was the poet’s love interest or lover early in life, but it’s written about way later after years. Gosh, there are so many. I love Cameron Awkward-Rich’s book ‘Dispatch.’ Oh, also Yanyi’s book ‘The Year of Blue Water.'”

James: Yes, I interviewed Yanyi a couple of years ago. Wonderful.

Cass: “That’s a beautiful book. I could go on—there are so many.”

James: The ‘Dracula’ erasure, I’m definitely going to track down—that sounds absolutely fascinating! And I know I always like to provide an opportunity for name-dropping because it expands the audience for those poets, which is wonderful. They deserve to be heard.

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.