I seem to thrive by destroying the last thing I did, in a kind of cartoon Nietzsche way. Emerson says in "Experience" something like "every ultimate fact soon becomes the next in a series." The self feels more real when you are destroying things you've made than when you are paying them homage. That's the good news about being self-destructive. The bad news, I feel I don't need to deliver.
Dan ChiassonI treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think thatโs accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively.
Dan ChiassonThe events in America now have the quality of things you would find out about long after the fact, and think: if only we had known. Well, we do know now. But what are we doing? Maybe a poet like Lowell brought America a little nearer to its boiling point.
Dan ChiassonIt's often said that elephants are the most human of animals - there's something comical about their acquiescence, and tragic also. The long elephant poem - I was trying to write from the point of view of someone who had been seduced by the logic of his punishers and who, in a kind of awful way, could reproduce the very logic that had put him in this predicament in the first place. And maybe, in some kind of minor way, that's something I feel about myself, or maybe about all selves, that they fall in love with the thing that oppresses them.
Dan ChiassonI was never trying to be funny. Being funny feels to me like an alternate form of confessionality - that is, a way of dismantling the distance between writer and reader, a way of saying, "come in a little closer."
Dan ChiassonOne problem with writing on the computer, as I do, is that the page is never really 'blank." It is backed by all this energy or potential energy...one can always check the New York Times, or look at real estate, or investigate some intriguing new person in one's life. The span and space for writing feels like a tunnel under these massive mountains of information.
Dan Chiasson