This is an extended version of the article that appears in the print edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The author of 21 books, poet Norman Dubie was born in 1945 in Barre, Vermont, and was writing poetry by age 11. He has always written, as he puts it, “out of the spirits of winter.” Indeed he completed his first book, Alehouse Sonnets, a volume of poems written to the 19th-century English essayist William Hazlitt, during a blizzard while a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The manuscript was chosen as a runner-up for the International Poetry Forum Prize, by a jury that included Richard Howard, and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1971.

It was Howard who recommended Dubie to launch the MFA program at Arizona State University in Tempe, where Dubie moved in 1975 and has lived for the past 30 years. Summers in the desert, which can bring temperatures of 120 degrees, have become his winters, when he “goes recluse” and writes.

Throughout his career, Dubie has become known for his persona poems—in his earlier work, for his dramatic monologues in the voices of historical figures, such as Queen Elizabeth I, Czar Nicholas of Russia, and Virginia Woolf. After the publication of The Everlastings (Doubleday, 1980), he decided to shift his chosen form from long, narrative poems to short lyrics: The Springhouse (1986), Groom Falconer (1989), and Radio Sky (1991), all published by Norton, followed. In 1992 he published The Clouds of Magellan (Recursos Press), a book of aphorisms written in the tradition of those in Wallace Stevens’s Opus Posthumous. He has also published his poetry in fine press editions and extensively in magazines, and his work has been translated into 30 languages.

After 20 years of a prolific career—publishing a book every other year or so—Dubie decided in the early ’90s to embark on a silence. The break coincided with his turning toward what has become the central focus of his life—the practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

I went to interview Dubie during monsoon season in Arizona, a time of vast storms that sweep over the desert, kicking up walls of sand. The occasion marked a return for me—I had studied with Dubie at ASU in the early 1990s. And it also marked Dubie’s return, it seems, to the publishing life.

His silence, which lasted the greater part of a decade, was broken in 2001 with the publication of his collected and new poems, The Mercy Seat, by Copper Canyon Press. The book received the annual PEN USA Prize for Best Book of Poetry. In November 2002 he published in the online journal Blackbird the first section of The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake, a three-part, futuristic epic poem inspired by Buddhist teachings. The second and third sections followed online in the spring and fall of 2003. The Spirit Tablets is 400 pages in length and was composed entirely through dictation; in the evenings Dubie spoke the poem, while poet Laura Johnson typed it, inserting line breaks along the way. In October Copper Canyon released his latest volume, Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum. Dubie is already at work on another.

We talked in his apartment over a couple of late afternoons—Dubie rises at about noon. He sits in meditation upon rising, at sunset, at sunrise, and sometimes in between. His apartment, once an average two-bedroom, is so ornamented with Buddhist objects, arranged together like small shrines, that the rooms seem circular, the edges rounded off. It’s an incredible place. After a warm greeting, he insisted on feeding me first—a hot pastrami sandwich with cottage cheese on the side—and then we began.

What interests you about the desert?
For a while I was very spooked by the desert. There’s a lot of sentient life here that we don’t necessarily see but feel. At this late date, I feel an actual connection with the old platform cultures that lived by the Salt River, where I live now. This area was very powerful to the people who were living here in, say, 1200. As a matter of fact, the Akimel O’odham used to say that there was such a history to this valley, so many illumined dead, that just to walk here on the land was to dream.

Before you settled in Arizona, you were at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Did you feel that anyone there was a particular mentor to you?
George Starbuck and Marvin Bell. Marvin was also a dear friend. George was a wonderful teacher to me. In fact, when he was leaving Iowa City to go, I believe, to Boston University, he took me to Donnelly’s. It was a place where Dylan Thomas fell from a bar stool to the floor and that sort of thing. George sat me down and said, “You know, I have this sense—I don’t know if it was a daydream or maybe I was just napping—that you are going to write a huge, long poem, 400 pages or something like that.” Until recently I thought that was complete insanity, but he charged me with this poem. And the responsibility to do it eventually hung over my head. I had no idea what shape it would take ultimately. It’s in the tradition of science fiction. So George was not only an important teacher to me when I was working on my first book, but his spirit urged me to write The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake.

Marvin Bell was a wonderful teacher to me and David St. John, Michael Burkhard, Michael Ryan, and Larry Levis. We would go off to coffee shops and bars and talk about poetry. You learn a great deal in bars, and in Iowa City you learned a great deal from your peers as much as from faculty. Marvin was a very intriguing reader of poetry and in effect he was beside us, reading with us, and writing with us as well. There was no major anxiety about his being the teacher and my being the student. He would leave us very relaxed. It was clear in our minds that he wanted us to go through some sort of exciting progress of discovery and that we were better off writing something really bad than something boring.

Did you know John Berryman?
I met Berryman not that long before his death. He was in Des Moines, at Drake. I think he was getting an honorary PhD. It was extraordinary to sit there with not that large an audience and have him read from the 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. He had incredible nervous energy. He had a nervous syntax, which is remarkable and makes the Dream Songs so unique.

[After the reading] I walked into the back of the dean’s house looking for the john and saw in the poor light of the kitchen, a man standing in front of the sink getting water. Water seemed like the next thing I would need. I went in to get it, and there was Berryman. He was such a sad figure there in that poor light. He seemed both very empty and very scared. We spoke a little bit—he was joking with me and being fatherly, talking about Don Justice, as I recall. We both went forward to the piano room, and there Maura Stanton was. He instantly, truly lighted up when he saw Maura, and walked up to her and began asking her questions like, “Do you think wickedness is soluble in art, my dear?”

You’ve said that your father was a radical minister.
Yes, he was. He was opposing the war in Vietnam from the pulpit in Andover, Massachusetts, with Raytheon executives down there in the pews. He was for prison reform, and there were always pantries in the back of the house with food for people who were hungry. My mother was a registered nurse. I got the weirdest introduction to writing from them—my mother, because she would come home from the hospital with the most grisly and grim, detailed stories about people dying, children dying. And she had to unload it, so she’d unload it at the supper table. We all had a love of detail, so we understood. She was as good a nurse as you could hope to have ever had. Very compassionate. And she had to clear a lot of this stuff, I suspect. I really learned not to blink, not to look away, from some of those things in life that are ugly and involve suffering.

And I watched someone who, every Saturday night, on a weekly basis, would steal up to his study, turn on big band music, and write a sermon—twelve, fifteen pages or something—which, with two to three hours’ sleep, he would then share with us all the next morning.

Because my father would sometimes be moved by things and would get weepy in the pulpit—and, of course, that was the most embarrassing damn thing that could happen to me as a little boy, with all my little-boyish friends around me—I was always completely on edge and alert when my father was preaching. I never knew when he was going to start crying in front of everyone. He was a brilliant writer. He made the strangest metaphors. He knew his Greek tropes. Some of his sermons are still memorable for me today. I know I picked up some of his phrasing Sunday after Sunday, listening. It was never boring. Like I said, I felt vulnerable during that, but connecting writing with that strange, adolescent anxiety about showing emotion helped me to defeat those instincts in myself to be shy and reserved, at least in terms of the writing. I think I could find a bold voice in my poems simply because of his example.

How do most of your poems arrive?
Voices will invade me and will go to the page effortlessly sometimes. But for the most part, the work that is of an audition is almost always difficult for me technically. There are many drafts and it’s very strange, the way I depend on the first speaking of the poem. My other experience involves momentary linear experiences—I’m writing what I’m seeing, in effect. To say that it’s visionary work is completely pretentious, but I, nevertheless, am making a fast record of what I’m seeing. Those are the poems I enjoy the most and that are the most completely surprising for me. For some reason, when the appeal is to my eye and not to my ear, all the oral properties of the poem or, let’s say, rhythmical contracts, rhyming, concealed rhyming, alliterative effects, all that stuff, seem to work well, even though its source is from a different sensory base—not the ear but the eye.

When you say one way poems arrive is through an audition, what does that mean?
It means I’m actually hearing these adopted voices that aren’t my own. I don’t know if one wants to admit to that—the guys with butterfly nets will come or something. [Laughs.]

What is your writing like these days?
I would say that for several years now, maybe since the writing of The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake, there’s been a criticism of life that’s emerged in my poetry that wasn’t there before. This doesn’t mean that I’m writing political poems—although people say that I am—but I am touched sometimes and, less commonly, made angry, by events. I am stirred to write poems now. I can’t help but look at what the consequences of our headlines are, and I see real things going on. It’s not just language, or, worse, politicians talking to one another. It’s really disturbing. It’s a kind of consciousness that I’m not sure that I had before, or maybe a lot of what I did in the past has been brought to consciousness more than ever before. It leaves me sometimes terribly sad.

I’m completely dismayed with the Bush administration and all the complicated ways in which the lives of real people are being ruined now and, clearly, deep into the future. I’m not even saying he’s not a likeable guy. God save us, he may get four more years, but I fear that terribly. If they get four more years, I think they’ll try to reverse Roe v. Wade, and then all of our daughters are going to [take to] the streets. And, all of a sudden, all those ungodly provisions of the Patriot Act are going to be used on our own children. Then maybe we’ll begin to understand what this administration represents.

Has your writing process changed because of what’s going on?
I think maybe after all of these years of writing poems, I should finally have some willingness to deal with things that are completely mundane or daily, even though they might be rather extraordinary in other ways. For example, the poem I’m writing now came off the TV news. I was sitting on the sofa in the middle of the night with my cat, Smoky. She had come up to have her arthritic leg massaged and to be given warmth. So I was comforting her and telling her all sorts of stories about herself. She was very happy, and I was with the other hand running across cable looking for something to watch. I didn’t feel like sleeping.

There was this news story about how that very night in Najaf, American marines were involved in hand-to-hand combat with Sadir’s militia in that ancient cemetery where there are hundreds of thousands of people buried at odd levels to one another. So suddenly here was this image of the ancestral dead, their towers, and these young men and women, insanely wrestling with one another—trying to kill one another. Well, I mean the details of it—which I’m cautiously not using here at all—are shocking and gave me this early draft of a poem I may never complete. [Dubie’s voice lowers.] Network journalists rarely share scenes like this with us, and yet it’s our tax dollar gone monstrous and Miltonic.

So there’s a double figure to these kinds of recognitions. That is to say, I’m not sitting in front of the blank page with my pencils in a nice array. Rather, I’m occupied with several things and the poem has to overwhelm them if, indeed, it wants its moment.

What do you think the role of the poet is in terms of politics?
I’m always writing a poem. If I’m making some sort of political statement—I mean, it’s fine for other people to do that—but I should be pretty much checked out, making the poem I have to make at that moment. If it carries a message, or if it carries ideas that could be described as political, then that’s fine, that’s just the gravy.

When you write poems in these other voices, they seem so detailed. What’s the context for that detail and for those images?
I really don’t know. I certainly feel sometimes like I’m making raids on things that are unspeakable almost. And I don’t always have a clear sense of who’s speaking in the poem even when it’s finished. Sometimes I discover soon afterward, and I just—as the laziest bastard on the planet—drop it in the title, which is the last thing I would invite my students to do. But when I discover that this odd poem about two old women who are, arm in arm, walking up a tree-lined street in Iowa City, is really about Madame Blavatsky, then I’m delighted just to title the poem “The Trees of Madame Blavatsky.” It’s great when that happens. But I think it pisses some people off. [Laughs.]

Why?
Because I think they want the body of evidence that says that this is me thinking of Madame Blavatsky to be more concrete. They want lighter commerce between the poem and the title. It’s very common for me not to know who the hell is speaking in the poem but having a very real sense that it’s someone, not me. Often as I conjure up another draft, it will suddenly dawn on me who is speaking, and then changes are made to accommodate that voice.

Is it ever you?
Yes. There’s a lot of vivid detail from my life. As I said, I come from a family that cares about the details. There are things from the lives of people around me. It’s all coded into the work, but considering when I was born, when I began writing, it’s fairly understandable that I would have moved away from all of the notions of the Confessional poets, the Lowell gang. Although it’s unfair to describe them in that way.

There was a great lie being told to us after the Second World War. It was there in the fifties kitchen, it was there in the fifties suburbs. There were artists all over who had survived unthinkable things like the depression and the war—the bloodlust of that war, the crimes of that war. And, of course, everybody would want to look around and smooth their shirt and pretend that nothing’s wrong and nothing will ever be wrong again. It was a lie, and it made some people damned anxious and left them tormented. A lot of these people were artists, and they healed themselves and others—I do believe the making of art can be hugely redemptive for a culture, even; it can be incriminating for a culture. These people whom we call Confessionalists or the Lowell gang, they’re very separate, immensely different people who just wrote truthfully about what was going on for them.

But after that example, I didn’t feel like telling people that I was going nuts. There are other ways of representing it that were equally healing for me. The world drives all of us nuts from time to time. Sometimes it’s our best-kept secret, but it comes from that original privacy of mind that is so stunning, say, in Emily Dickinson.

In Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum, you open with a prologue—the poem “Confession,” which had originally been published in 1991. It ends with the lines: “Something inhuman in you watched it all. / And whatever it is that watches, / It has kept you from loneliness like a mob.” Why did you open the book this way?
I wrote this poem, oddly enough, when the elder George Bush was invading Panama. I was watching coverage on television. It was one of those situations where the journalists were heavily left out rather than embedded, so I was imagining what was going on, and suddenly this poem occurred. It surprised me in the very end with a huge criticism of what I was doing—an American citizen watching another one of our wars on television—so it was a stick sharpened at both ends, that’s for sure. An undergraduate of mine [suggested] that I should use this poem as a prologue. It made sense to me, especially in terms of this book.

Why in terms of this book?
It’s about the objective datum. There are all sorts of things that are commonplace and extraordinary being witnessed in this book. [My student’s idea of] inserting it there asks you right from the start to think of me as someone who is witnessing for you. And it’s an invitation, perhaps, for all of us to reexamine our point of view, our assumptions about what we are seeing, how we scrabble together our sensory gifts and make judgments about things.

It seems that with witnessing there is a kind of responsibility.
Yes, except, I never volunteered to witness. I know I’m a writer, and I understand I’m a poet, but I’m not sure in any way did I volunteer to witness like, say, someone from the New York Times or NBC who is now in the Sudan, where there’s so much disease and famine—such horrible things happening. Those people are there, and they’re witnessing it. They live under all kinds of restraints; they suffer revelations that I couldn’t imagine being presented with except through the force of the imagination. There’s always some sense, when it comes to the force of the imagination, that it’s not real after all.

And yet when I read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as a kid, and I knew that he was in no position to write about the Civil War—he just talked to some men in the Bowery who were destroyed veterans of that war and put together this fantastic novel. Then shortly afterward he went off on exotic assignments as a journalist and literally did witness things and wrote about them. It’s painful to compare the writing, because what he imagined is so much more powerful than what he literally saw. Realizing that, at such a young age, I gave myself permission, as you can tell, to write about a good deal more than what’s under my nose.

Do you feel that practicing Tibetan Buddhism has changed your writing?
There’s no way you have any success with a sitting, there’s no way that you can actually begin a sitting and somehow tolerate it and not be changed utterly in so many ways. More than anything else, it makes you aware of your own bullshit. It’s, again, a matter of witnessing. The obligations in terms of witnessing the self cannot be counted, and lead to very painful moments and the most beautiful, tranquil moments as well.

Would you talk about your ten-year silence?
Any writer, any artist, can fall into a kind of mannerist writing in which you’re almost caricaturing your own work or satirizing your own work. I felt I was at the point of doing that. I gave a few poems to Jorie Graham for, I think, the Colorado Review, and everything I wrote after that for about six months made me very nervous in those terms. So I said, “Well, hell, I’m going to stop writing for a while. Maybe a year, maybe two.” This was the time when I had fallen into this interest in Buddhism. It and the teaching completely absorbed me.

It wasn’t like Robert Duncan, I wasn’t protesting the war in Vietnam—and, unlike Duncan, I lived beyond my silence, knock on wood. But I have to say truthfully that nothing ever entered my life with such force as the simple sitting practice and the energy, the states of mind that were involved, the states of mind that were filled with a kind of self-criticism I’d never really enjoyed before. It was all very depressing and scary and lovely. It will touch every cell in your body, this practice. I don’t know, the notion that I’d not only found a religion but one that was animate—if it is indeed a religion—well, it was good news. And it was probably time for me to rest. I had done probably too much work.

When I was plagued by my friends into making a collected, I got drunk one night with a friend named Marianne, and we typed up a table of contents. I chain-smoked and put half of my work on the floor and decided to keep half of it. I was beginning to write again, so I had a new section. I showed it to Louisiana State University Press, and they rejected it. Then I was asked to show it to Copper Canyon, a press I’d respected for the longest time. They have a staggering catalogue, they’re nonprofit, and the people there are some of the best editors in the country.

Did you submit the actual manuscript to Copper Canyon?
I did, a huge manuscript that I had prepared for Norton but really presented to them in such a way that there was no way that they could take it. I wanted to leave Norton at that point. It wasn’t anything personal at all, not at all. It was simply that I wanted to go to a press where they weren’t forced to be thinking of money in the same way that trade publishers are. I just wanted in my old age to go somewhere where there was some very pure instruction working behind the publishing of poetry.

In New York there’s a lot of young poets writing out of the Language tradition. What do you think of that?
I think Language poetry is everywhere—I was in a workshop in 1970 with David Maurice and Barrett Watten. It’s a shame that we try to create barriers in this way.

I’ve always been fascinated with Language poetry. It was an extension, a very beautiful filtering of work that dates from mid-century. That there’s narrative lurking in syntax is something that I recognized early on in the writing of these people, so in a funny way they were doing that despised thing now: the lyric narrative, and even Ezra Pound’s “juxtaposition without cupola” is defined fiercely here by practice. I think I sometimes find narrative where other people don’t. I connect between the dots where other people don’t. But that’s probably because I go to reading poems almost as clear or empty-headed as I go to the writing of them. In any event, the predictable obstacles aren’t always there for me and when I’m surprised by a poem it is truly a good day.

Earlier we talked also about how sometimes poems arrive to you visually. Do you ever find that in translating them into language, that language is inept?
If I’m very consciously moving on the details that will be a source of bad or precious writing in my poetry, but if I trust the atmosphere of what I’m seeing, there’s all sort of surprising combinations in language, all sorts of surprising images, interesting musical things that happen. I’m not a journalist in this business of what I’m seeing and how it reaches the page. Though still I think the first handmaiden to all of this writing has something to do with elaborate choruses and not with cinema.

Is the act of writing sacred for you?
There’s probably some brain chemistry that I’m rewarded with when I sit down to write because I do go clear. In that sense there is something very centering about sitting to write, but yet sitting to write is not the same thing as sitting to meditate. No matter how often I go to that woolly centering in the writing, no matter how I often I went, it would never want me to be a better person, more imaginative about other people and the ways in which they’re confused or suffering. I did it for too long, and I know that I wasn’t changed or made a more decent person because of it. Meanwhile, this other thing that I do can make for little changes that are actually mind-boggling in a way, because it is so difficult for us to get free of whatever is nasty or habitual in our makeup. It’s so hard for us not to be fearful, and it’s so hard for us to really understand that someone who’s very angry with us could suddenly be very sweet if we just show [him] the smallest consideration.

Are you afraid of anything?
There is in Buddhist traditions heavy preparations, as the Dali Lama suggests, for the entry into the Bardo of death itself. There are practices in Buddhism that might seem very grim to other people. You can on a regular basis imagine just flying off your bones, then you can imagine the flesh feeds the carnivores and the meal of the bone feeds the earth.

What happens here is that as you do this practice your connection with the body lightens. It makes for less fear. Sometimes when I’m approaching the idea of death, which I often have traditionally through my poetry, I just start laughing because I see myself in some hospital room screaming at people that I don’t want to die and further more I want to be treated much better because this is the most expensive goddamned hotel that I’ve ever been in. And why can’t I have a cigarette! There are moments that are very powerful in my Chod practice that I can’t really say a hell of a lot about. Surely, there are moments that are quite lovely. They’re quiet. And when I’m done, I distrust them the most. [Laughs.] You know, it’s just brain chemistry dude! I’m giving myself a big dose of dose.

It’s about looking into the teeth of a whole lot of things: pain, suffering, death, disease, and I don’t know what. I believe in it. If for no other reason than in doing the practice on a daily basis I care more about how I treat the cat, how I treat my many students, or, say, some cashier at a drugstore. I really don’t think it necessarily prepares me for death. It prepares me for life. When it comes time, I think I probably will be screaming for morphine. And not more light. Just more! [Laughs.]

Why don’t you give readings?
Poetry has been a solitary thing for me. Not exactly the one candle at midnight. Besides that’s probably the scholar’s accoutrement. But that original privacy of mind that’s so special to all of us, poetry goes there without harming anything. We can visit there and make raids on memory and come back with fragments of language with which to make poems. It’s all a very mysterious and intense thing, and it relates more to silence than to noise. As a young man I was just really shy. I didn’t want to appear in front of audiences, but I had to do it in order to put food on the table. To get my daughter the yellow dress. The moment I didn’t have to do it anymore I stopped. Though, it’s odd, the last year and a half I’ve done five or six readings in town for folks, and I enjoyed them. So that seems to betray me as someone who maybe is okay about doing readings but doesn’t like to travel that much. Can’t imagine why.

You have said that you think this might be a golden age for American poetry. How so?
I just witness it. I think that there’s a privilege in our culture that will tolerate people writing poems, that will tolerate people teaching the writing of poems, that will allow poets to make a living. Some poets in this country now are making an obscene living doing the circuits, and not so much teaching as being academic paratroopers—visiting five or six universities in a year and making three times what most of [us] make. I have nothing against this. Barnstorming should go on, I suppose, in poetry, and has, clearly, since Frost and Dickey and others.

If we’re remembered as a nation, as a culture of people, an awful lot of poetry and writing in general will survive from this period. It’s a wonderful time to be reading. There’s so much good poetry being written now that there’s twice as much bad poetry being written.

Maybe the point I’m trying to make is obscured; maybe I’m a great maker of the fog myself. I wouldn’t know. None of us know how this will all be thrashed out. We’re always talking in our hats when we speak like this, but it’s just an instinct. I think we’re the most important nation on the earth right now, because, one: we have thermonuclear weapons, and two: because we have more talented poets than have ever existed on the face of the earth.

Mary Gannon is deputy editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Read four new poems by Norman Dubie:
"The Wolf's Lair [3]"
"The Coroner's Confession [4]"
"The Kites of Shrove Monday [5]"
"Out of the Mouth of Cygnus [6]"