Dorianne Laux's "Family Stories"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dorianne Laux is the author of several collections of poetry, including What We Carry (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Smoke (2000); Facts about the Moon (2005), chosen by the poet Ai as winner of the Oregon Book Award and also a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Book of Men (2011), which was awarded the Paterson Prize; and Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected (2019). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been a Pushcart Prize winner. Laux’s free-verse poems are sensual and grounded, and they reveal the poet as a compassionate witness to the everyday. She observed in an interview for the website Readwritepoem, “Poems keep us conscious of the importance of our individual lives ... personal witness of a singular life, seen cleanly and with the concomitant well-chosen particulars, is one of the most powerful ways to do this.” Speaking of the qualities she admires most in poetry, Laux added, “Craft is important, a skill to be learned, but it’s not the beginning and end of the story. I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of the living.” She was first inspired to write after hearing a poem by Pablo Neruda. Other influences include Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich.Laux has taught creative writing at the University of Oregon, Pacific University, and North Carolina State University; she has also led summer workshops at Esalen in Big Sur. She is the co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997). She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, December 27, 2003.
0:09.6	Today's poem is by Dorian Locke's contemporary American poet and longtime Oregonian,
0:19.1	which would endear her to me, no matter what the circumstances, though she now lives
0:24.0	in North Carolina and is a professor of poetry and creative writing at North Carolina State
0:30.0	University. Lox has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Pushcart Prize, the National Book Critics
0:40.6	Circle Award, been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
0:45.4	Her poetry has appeared in the likes of the American Poetry Review, the Canyon Review,
0:50.5	and many others.
0:53.9	And the poem I'll be reading today is entitled
0:58.3	Family Stories.
1:01.3	It may be that you are listening to this over the holiday season
1:06.4	and have been making some family stories of your own.
1:10.7	I hope for your sakes that they don't
1:14.0	resemble the ones in the poem I'm about to read. You'll see why in a second. Here's family
1:22.8	stories. I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument once ended with his father,
1:34.2	when his father seized a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurled it out a second-story window.
1:41.0	That, I thought, was what a normal family was like.
2:01.2	Anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine, it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believe the people in his stories really loved one another, even when they yelled and shoved their feet through cabinet doors, or held a chair like a bottle of cheap champagne,
2:06.3	christening the wall, rungs exploding from their holes.
2:11.0	I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury of the passionate.
2:15.5	He said it was a curse being born Italian and Catholic, and when he looked
	...

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