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Interview: Jim Ray Daniels

Jim Raymond Daniels was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1956. Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English. His literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series, and he has won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at Alma College and Bowling Green State University. Daniels also collaborates with director John Rice to create films of merged media. He is the author, editor, co-editor, or scriptwriter for forty-four books and films.

The following interview took place with Jim Ray Daniels on November 18, 2017, at the Miami Book Fair. Since that time, he has published an additional collection of poetry, The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018) and a collection of stories, The Perp Walk (Michigan State University Press, 2019), as well as co-editing Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press, 2019). While this interview focuses on Rowing Inland, we hope it will illuminate Daniels’s prolific output and poetic sensibility more generally.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

Before we talk about your collection Rowing Inland I want to get you to speak a moment on imagery. I watched the trailer for one of your films, The End Of Blessings, based on your poem of the same name.

The camera follows an African American cyclist on his weekly Sunday ride, when he regularly passes an older Italian couple sitting on their porch after church. There’s no dialogue. You concentrate on imagery, sounds, and the breathing, and you’re taking the art of poetry and putting it into film. This may sound naïve, but I was blasted by the film. I mean, we don’t expect to see these kinds of crossovers of art forms.

Jim Ray Daniels:

We know when we make these short films that we can’t expect to make any money off them. There’s been other films made of poems, and typically you’ll see the text on the screen, or the voice-over, and we were like, yeah, we’re not going do to either of those things. We want to make a work of art and do something interesting and different with the medium of film, and so we focus in on sound and imagery, which are also huge parts of poetry writing. In that way, we hope we can get across the essence of the poem.

TFR:

I love that, because when you’re introducing someone to poetry, they can feel quite intimidated They may be too concerned they might not understand poetry. In my intro to poetry classes, I show students pictures of cave paintings to stress the importance of imagery and the ancient tie we have to images. When I watched the video this morning I thought, wow, I want to use it in the classroom.

Daniels:

I’ll give you the link to the full film.

TFR:

Thank you! A film like this will help the student move away from words and worrying about the words’ meanings, to a place where they see the images and hear the rhythms, and we don’t mean perfect end-rhymes. It might spark them to pay attention to sound as they move about their world.  So, tell, me, where did this idea came from? I read that you are an avid cyclist—

Daniels:

That’s correct.

TFR:

What sparked you to do this? To move from the poem to the film?

Daniels:

As a writer I try and find what’s going on beneath the surface—and in Rowing Inland, I think you see a lot of it, too, where on the surface it doesn’t seem as if you see a lot of things, or like nothing interesting is happening. So, a guy riding up a hill on his bicycle—on the surface you don’t think there’s anything going on, but there really is a lot layered in there.  And, I try to write a lot about my own experiences and enthusiasms. The director—he’s my partner in these films, his name is John Rice, he’s great, he’s also a big cyclist, and he said, “Have you ever written anything about cycling? Maybe we should make a movie about cycling.” And I said, “I got this poem, ‘The End of Blessings,’” and he said, “We can do this!” It’s a short film, and it and the poem each are in three parts: You rise up the hill, the old couple’s there, you rise up the hill, the old couple is not there, he rides up the hill, and the woman is there by herself.

I gave away the ending (laughs).

TFR:

I think it’s a wonderful medium to get people to see poetry as they walk down their street, go to the local store, to see images and hear rhythm all around. Anything to get people to appreciate poetry, but I don’t have to tell you that.

Daniels:

(Laughing) No, no.

TFR:

Rowing Inland is packed with imagery, imagery of Detroit in particular, and memories of adolescence, and parents and the grandfather, the yard, and mowing grass, there’s just so much here. When you’re writing, are you back there in your mind, where you are this past self again?

Daniels:

I get transported back to those places. And it’s really exciting as a writer—as a writer yourself I’m sure you’ve experienced this, too—where suddenly the process of writing does take you back. One of things poetry does is preserves moments in time, like photographs, an emotional kind of photograph, and I like to keep track of things and go back and move forward and revisit things I’ve written about before and see them differently through the lens of the present. I guess I’ve always written a lot about Detroit, and first there was some concern I was repeating myself, but—I feel like I always bring this up, it’s my mantra—novelist Richard Price said that where you’re from is “like the zip code for your heart.” I just remind myself that no matter where I go that’s in me, that place is in me and those people are in me, and they help shape who I am today. There’s the mother lode of experiences when you’re growing up and adolescence too, though not the whole book is about that.

The other thing for me, with that book, is people say, where are you from?, and I say, well I’m, from Detroit, because it’s easy to say, and, yeah, I was born in Detroit. But we moved to Warren, Michigan, right outside Detroit when I was a young boy. And so here, in this book, I deal more with Warren, which is the city bordering Detroit, where I went to high school. People from Detroit know that Warren and Detroit are two very different places. And, it has to do with coming back to James Baldwin in a way, with race. In Jeffrey Eugenides’ book Middlesex, he has some scenes of the riots in Detroit in 1967 and he once said, “Detroit is always about race.” And I wanted to make that distinction, so the long section in the center is a series of poems that are connected called “Welcome to Warren.” I wanted to capture this place people would just drive through, because it’s so anonymous-seeming. It’s basically houses surrounded by car factories. I wanted to try to bring that place to life—even if all the houses on the street look the same, the people are all different.

TFR:

Often there’s a way you might enter a certain collection, maybe from an emotional place or a geographical place, some kind of familiarity, some commonalities, and there was so much for me to discover in this book that was familiar to me. I’m from Chicago. Chicago, Detroit—you and I grew up within a few years of each other, in the land and culture of the steel mill towns, so when I read this, I kept going “yes” and I’ve already marked, noted, and highlighted the heck out of it,

As I read, I was conscious of how you were returning “home” as poet, and I thought about how I return to Chicago in my writing, though I haven’t lived there in decades. It’s my haunt, my muse. So I’m reading about the Detroit area, I’ve been to Detroit several times, I have relatives close by, and I kept feeling how much this is a familiar place, yet it is so much more than just one place.

Daniels:

It’s funny you mention Chicago, because Chicago writer Stuart Dybeck was a huge influence on me as a writer. So Chicago was his town, and he really brought it to life in his poems and stories, he writes both, and was a influence on me as a young writer.

That’s the key to writing about place so that others beyond that place can appreciate it, and that’s where the imagery comes in. Even though somebody may not be interested in going in an auto factory, you’re going to pull them in and say, Hey! look around, There’s poetry here.

TFR:

There is, and you’ve sparked me, inspired me with images of empty factories, the steel factories, which might sound strange. Also, there were so many poems in your collection that talked about the basement, and most of us who grew up “up north” had basements—down here in Florida, we don’t have basements, but there are so many poems in Rowing Inland that refer to the basement—

Daniels:

I never thought about that! But, yeah, (laughing) the basement’s big!

TFR:

In my life, the basement was a place, is a place, that holds a lot of memories. I was so touched by these particular poems, and I think that you as poet sometimes don’t know how your work, your words, might reach a reader until the book’s been out a while and you start to hear from readers.

In writing about the basement, you also wrote “upstairs she kept the order”—speaking about your mother— and then, “Downstairs, he drove another nail in.” You bring us into this neighborhood, this home, so that much of Rowing Inland is clearly set not in the heart of the city, but in a suburb, that commonality of so many Americans. At least, that’s where the first section is; the book is organized into four sections—

You have a line in here, where you’re an adolescent where you don’t quite understand what’s going on in the adult world, and in the “eight mile,” where you have physical landscape a little removed from the city—and as a poet, you make the connections and, then it reaches me, who grew up in a different city. Do the connections surprise you? Or do you feel they’ve always been there and just sort of bubble up a little bit?

Daniels:

I like when the connections surprise me. Your subconscious mind keeps going back to things without your realizing it.

And it’s true that adolescence is a time, especially in the suburbs, where we often didn’t fully understand what was going on. Eight Mile Road is the border between Detroit and Warren where the rapper Eminem is from. He did a film called 8 Mile, because he’s from that area, and there’s this whole border mentality, and that’s why he called the movie 8 Mile, and it’s like ten lanes wide and in the Detroit area. This kind of border mentality has kind of a symbolic resonance. It was interesting growing up there as a kid—you didn’t quite understand what was going on, such as with the riots in 1967.

TFR:

I want to ask about a poem that haunted me, the one about the young woman who died, in the fire?

Daniels:

Marlene, in “Calling out Marlene Miller.”

 TFR:

You were in Warren then.

Daniels:

Yes. She haunts me. Basically, your first death growing up—one that’s not like a grandparent. It is huge. Your first love is huge, but especially when your first love is also your first death.

 TFR:

And having to put those two together—they don’t leave you. You’ve written about her before.

Daniels:

It keeps on, I wouldn’t be surprised if I write more about her at various points.

TFR:

Some of us have one muse, some several, but we keep returning to them. I tell students to return to them. They’re bittersweet, those sorrows. Marlene Miller comes back again, in this book.

Daniels:

I think there’s three poems in here about her.

TFR:

I was surprised that she continues, yet there was a sense of satisfaction that she does. I start to feel like I know Marlene or I knew Marlene. There were Marlene’s in my life, and I believe many of us have such figures who haunt us.

Would you read a poem for me? “Weeding Out the Week”? Loved it. Took me back to the little brick row houses just south of Chicago, of Riverdale, where I grew up. The weeds, the brick, the rough brick.

Daniels:

Yes, sure, and it’s about trying to find your hiding places (laughs).

TFR:

Yes! Can young people even have hiding places anymore?

Daniels:

That’s a good question. I don’t have the answer, but in our current culture I think it’s harder. Behind the garage, between houses, little places where things were peaceful, and you could sort them out on your own. without the whole world watching

TFR:

To turn to your personal voice, there’s a poem where you were coming into a sort of self-realization. You say,  “I only faintly began to realize life is mostly a series of rhetorical questions.”  We all go through these self-discoveries, don’t we?

Daniels:

Yes, yes. These are things that happen: self-discoveries are necessary.