Tiff Dressen: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Tiff Dressen

Three Poems

O hypothalamus

O hypothalamus hidden desperate

mindfuck I’m hugging

fences O storage locker night clocker

I’m leaving you behind

O milkweed butter and

frankfurters Enough!

O traffic cone

quartet swoon and fester

O water tower

invading my dreams O dandelion seed-cloud

pistil mister

I’m falling for

a season of yellows

O my eyes

O my throat

Lorine Niedecker

Where kildeer nested

where we waited for the sun to go down

where we found the black and

brown speckled eggs unattended

where milkweed grew

where I tried to incubate the eggs

with a soft fist

where spiders were abundant

after rain where the cottonwoods

were mature where an egg fell

on concrete stairs

where it was always a little darker

And a few degrees cooler

where a bird embryo was

left still

thousands of green hands waving

where leaves shook in the wind

Poem for Epiphany #4

“I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet on this shore.”

–Agnes Martin

We are navigators,

even if by mind. I watch

my cat. She naps in a

puddle of rare

sunlight. We wait

for more rain.

January is biblical.

I dream I’m building

a petite ship

I call “night ark.”

At the museum cafe bar

the man next to me

reads a book about the lives

of Chinese hermits.

I think about small

insects preserved

in amber silence.

I prepare myself

to go into

the world to

carry silence like

a resin bubble

a new organ

Walking across

the frozen lake

I follow a trail

tiny paws and

hint of tail

or feather I think

of ice as another

silence shroud

between me

and a god swimming

beneath my feet

I can only sense

presence I think

the albedo effect is

a miracle how

bright the day

becomes

She soaked white

and luminous stretch

of canvas the feeling

of snow banking

as if it were alive

in that moment

every moment I

bothered to look

it was there

with its atomic

blitz and shiver

asking me

to awaken

Interview

April 10th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Tiff Dressen, Poet

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: You’re fond of the term flâneur and have even used it to describe yourself. There are of course definitions out there but it would be more interesting to know: What does that word mean, personally, for you and your poetry?

TD: This might sound a bit absurd, but for me, being a flâneur is probably akin to a spiritual practice. Not only is it about being alive and fully present out in the world—embracing every aspect of being out—but the world itself invites my deep attention. I can only begin to understand people and place by being out among them. This makes me think of that beautiful stanza from Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous:”

We are pressed, pressed on each other, We will be told at once Of anything that happens

I’m writing this response in early April 2025 and, with each day, becoming more acutely aware of how critical our relationships, our networks are. My mantra is to remind myself, paraphrasing the thoughts of Carvell Wallace from his book Another Word for Love, that all we really have in this world is each other. Being out and fully present in the world is one of the ways I feel connected to others.

DG: Your latest book, Of Minerals, draws on a wide variety of disciplines to capture the essence of the natural world—we find music, mathematics, and the influence of other poets congregating to form a unique whole. Is there a method to how you select the ingredients, or does the writing process itself guide the ideas?

TD: I love your choice of the word “congregate” because it perfectly captures the diverse conversations unfolding in my mind from these different perspectives. Throughout my life, I’ve been consistently drawn to synchronicities, patterns, and hidden correspondences in the world–the subtle connections that the business of everyday life often obscures, the under the radar linkages that bind us whether we realize it or not. As an example (which probably seems way out there and I acknowledge that), I’m interested in the possible connection between quantum entanglement and what we refer to as karma, that spiritual cause and effect.

DG: Let’s stay with the collection and talk about San Francisco, which naturally features in it. There’s a poem about the dichotomy between nature and the environment we’ve made for ourselves. It feels, though, that these poems are not just about San Francisco but about a larger interplay between civilization and Earth itself. Some poems signal harmony between the two—at the same there’s also dissonance. How do you see these forces playing out?

TD: I grew up in an area in the Twin Cities, Minnesota that one might refer to now as a wildland-urban-interface (WUI). I grew up near the edge of a swamp surrounded by deciduous woodlands. Not a lot, but enough. And probably because of that, I’ve been drawn my whole life to edges, where city and nature overlap. These days I do not feel or sense harmony between the two. Perhaps the sense of harmony you were picking up on was my own desire to imagine the possibility of harmony because poetry can do that–it can help us imagine (and maybe even realize) other futures. But I’d like to shift from my own work and give a shout out to dear human: AT THE EDGE OF TIME: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, an anthology of poetry published by Paloma Press in 2023. This anthology is a companion to the 5th National Climate Assessment. Simply put, this anthology is a gift. It allows us to feel and experience the variety of perspectives of poets from varying backgrounds, geographies and ages, how they are experiencing climate change, whether that’s memorializing what’s been lost, experiencing awe for what remains and what we must fight to protect, or re-imagining a more equitable society–in harmony with nature. I also want people to check out the Art X Climate Gallery which is the first art gallery to be featured in the National Climate Assessment.

DG: Your work is known for its brevity, capturing snapshots of time and place. Lorine Niedecker has been a visible inspiration in all this. When did you discover her work and what fascinates you most about her writing?

TD: I think I encountered her work right around the time of the centenary celebrations (~2003) of her work and life. I distinctly recall an event in San Francisco where poet Thom Gunn got up and read “Wintergreen Ridge” in its entirety. It made such a deep impression on me and I actively sought out her work. To me, this poem perfectly integrates the harmony and dissonances you mention in the previous question. I think it’s worth an extended quote here:

Sometimes it’s a pleasure

to grieve

or dump

the leaves most brilliant

as do trees

when they’ve no need

of an overload

of cellulose

for a cool while

Nobody, nothing

ever gave me

greater thing

which if intense

makes sound

Unaffected

by man

thin to nothing lichens

grind with their acid

granite to sand

These may survive

the grand blow up…

The poem was written in the late 60s–a few years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published. To me, the poem feels haunted by the Bay of Pigs crisis earlier in the decade and, of course, the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Niedecker writes attentively and deeply about the natural world while being a person in the human world, acutely aware of the social, political and economic realities of the human condition. I have deep love and admiration for her and her work. Also, we’re both from the midwest–I feel that connection, too. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

DG: In a 2014 interview discussing Songs from the Astral Bestiary you talk about “the idea of poetry being a place or space where you can create your own mythology ... there's something about it that feels instinctual to me ... about creating one's own mythology.” Do you see the creation of poetic mythology as a form of healing or more like a guiding principle to help us navigate the world?

TD: Ha! That seems like such an arrogant thing for my younger self to have said! I think I was deep into reading HD (Hilda Doolittle) at the time and marveling at the way she reimagined Greek mythologies through a modern, feminist, and sometimes mystical lens. Giving Helen of Troy, for example in Helen in Egypt, interiority, agency and spiritual depth that the classical stories didn’t permit. You could say that she didn’t just borrow those myths; she made them her own. I see creating poetic mythology as both a form of healing and a guiding principle to help us maneuver through the world. You mention the poem “Because Icarus-children” below and, I think, that was my attempt to re-imagine the Icarus story. But to envision us as spiritual descendents of Icarus, forever grounded (in all senses of that word) by gravity, mourning the freedom and possible futures lost to us, and yet continuing to exist, and honoring the dignity in survival. Yes, Icarus didn’t survive, but we’re trying to.

DG: I’d like to talk about form, and how your poems vary in their presentation. Discussing Because Icarus-children in a 2012 interview you say: “I wouldn't say it's completely arbitrary ... but there's an intuitive sense of what looks right and what doesn't look right to me. And when I see it I know it.” Does the way you read the poem out loud during the editing process also influence the line and has the amount of revision you do increased or decreased over the years?

TD: My revision process hasn't changed much over the years, but I do more revising now. My self-editing filter—for better or worse—has become more vigilant with age. I do find that coming to any creative endeavor with a Buddhist beginner’s mind can be an antidote to that. I think that also requires practicing a beginner's mind in all aspects of one’s life–not just conjuring it up for specific purposes.

I think the sonic and visual energies of poems are highly complementary, one informing the other. I’m constantly reading the poems aloud while writing and editing. They are very linked.

However, the “final” presentation of a poem is always missing something, a dimensionality, how the poem evolved over time. I’d love to make a little movie of a poem, from its beginning to end. Maybe I’ll do that next.

DG: In the same interview you talk about the relationship you have between science and poetry: “Often I feel like I'm a messenger or translator between two worlds—the world of the scientists and engineers that I interact with on a daily basis and my life as a poet ... If I had to define myself in any way, the major defining point would be that I'm moving back and forth between those two worlds.” Do you see these aforementioned worlds as inherently separate disciplines or is there something poetic about science and vice versa—should poetry, to some extent, also be scientific?

TD: I don’t think scientific inquiry and poetic inquiry are necessarily inherently separate disciplines, but in practice, they most often are. I spent a good chunk of my professional career working for a physical chemist who studies the initial stages of photosynthesis and how energy moves around (exceedingly! efficiently) in Photosystems 1 and 2. I’d often help him prepare his presentations for general audiences. I was curious, I am curious, and I asked a lot of questions, and he patiently explained things as clearly as he could without getting into more complex math concepts like Hamiltonians which I fully appreciated. What I realized from that experience as well as others that came after is that in the spirit of discovery, a space of wonder can open where reproducible knowledge ends, and that’s where poetry (and art), at least for me, can be a powerful mode of inquiry. As for poetry being rigorous and scientific, I don’t necessarily think it should be, but it can be. In their own way, I think of Emily Dickinson’s poems as scientific not in a technical sense but in an almost empirical attention to detail. For those interested in poetry and science I highly recommend Maria Popova’s The Universe in Verse, 15 Portals to Wonder Through Science & Poetry.

DG: Your fondness for walking is well known. What are your favorite places—both natural and urban—in the Bay Area for that?

TD: There are so many and so I’ll only touch upon a few. In the last few years, I’ve migrated from San Francisco back to Oakland where we have our very own tidal lagoon known as Lake Merritt. Lake Merritt is special for many reasons; I love the way it knits together many Oakland neighborhoods. It’s our promenade. Oakland has its own redwood forests, too. The Redwood Regional Park and Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve (yes, the site of an ancient volcano). A little further afield, there’s Point Reyes National Seashore where the tule elk live. I love visiting the tule elk, especially on a misty, foggy day, and experiencing the bioluminescence in Tomales Bay in the late summer and early autumn.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

TD: At the moment, I am deep in San Francisco poet Aaron Shurin’s Elixir, New and Selected Poems which will be published by Nightboat Books in June this year. It’s a monumental book. I recently finished Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. I’m working my way through Andrea Lawlor’s very queer and very wild Paul Takes the Form of A Mortal Girl and have started Dreaming in the Fault Zone, a Poetics of Healing, also published by Nightboat Book, by the amazing Bay Area poet and scholar Eleni Stecopolous. Through the Community of Writers, I’m taking a deeper dive into poetry of Latin America, with a course called “Latin American Death Trip” taught by poet/translators Forrest Gander and Carmen Giménez. I’m in more of a reading zone at the moment. However, my friend and longtime collaborator, Alex Mattraw and I are currently collaborating on a series of haibuns, a Japanese literary form that combines prose and haiku.

Author Bio:

Tiff Dressen's most recent book of poems Of Mineral was published by Nightboat Books in 2022. They live in Oakland and work at UC Berkeley. They are currently reading Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith.