 poem. Otherwise the words tend to sit there dully on the page.
AMK: You utilize the em dash in the fourth and fifth stanzas, which is typically used to set apart a “violent disruption” in the sentence, but this isn’t a terribly violent disruption at all. I’m not sure the poem changes much if you replace them with commas, and I can see ways in which you could use fragments as in the stanzas before to get these lines into the poem with equal attention. Then again, there’s a part of me that takes those em dashes as a signal to change my tone when I read and, with the repetition of “in the,” a little more quickly. Is the em dash used here as a sort of stage direction to the reader? Am I overanalyzing?
DG: I do love dashes. They provide a small rhythmic pause and clear out a small semantic space without chopping up the poem. Maybe that’s why Emily Dickinson loved them so much. I’ve never thought of the double dash as violently disruptive. It seems a mark of many moods.
AMK: There’s a mysterious “him” that enters in the third to last line who, it seems, the speaker’s prayer is for. I have no problem with this because prayers typically are for either the self or someone else, but I can also imagine a workshop of poets all clamoring over the unidentified “he” showing up so close to the end of the poem. Is this a risk you’re taking or is such criticism simply misplaced?
DG: I’m sure you are right about how a poetry workshop might react to the end of “Prayer.” But who cares what a workshop would think? Poems are not written for committees.
 A poem should not be afraid to embrace a little of it. Mystery is not the same as obscurity or muddle. A mystery is a truth we feel but don’t fully understand—exactly the sort of meaning poetry expresses best.
In isolation, the him in “Prayer” may seem mysterious, which I don’t mind since it lets the reader project his or her own life into the poem. But in its original context, as the first poem in The Gods of Winter, a book dedicated to the memory of my first son, the identity of the him should less puzzling.
AMK: I’m aware of the dangers of applying a writer’s biography to that of the speaker in her/his poetry. What’s your take on this issue of speaker/author in contemporary poetry?
DG: A poet necessarily creates out of his or her own life experience. Being rooted in that way isn’t bad. It gives a writer authority and authenticity. The problem is when the poet can’t move beyond autobiography. I believe that the best poetry is usually personal without being strictly autobiographical. There is a sense of a real human being writing, but the poet isn’t simply talking about himself or herself, but finds a way to address and engage the reader. Usually the engagement is implicit rather than explicit, but the poem is about us not about me.
AMK: Almost every poem in “Gods of Winter” starts with a certain number of lines per stanza and maintains that number throughout. Why does this matter to you?
DG: I write best when there is some resistance. That is especially true with free verse. If I work in five line stanzas, I find myself compressing eight or nine lines into five in ways that make the final lines richer and more evocative. There is also aesthetic pleasure in symmetry, as long as it also contains elements of variety and surprise.
AMK: Why, with that in mind, does “Prayer,” the first poem in the book, end with that dangling one-line stanza?
DG: Why not end with a single line? It seems conclusive. And it adds an element of disruptive energy and surprise. I appreciate your minute attention to the formal and stylistic elements of my poems. I take these matters seriously. I ponder formal elements in my poems. I rarely use traditional fixed forms. I tend to experiment in some way and like to think I have a reason for everything I do. But it feels too self-regarding to talk about at such length. I don’t want to spend time justifying the style of my poems. Either the poems speak compellingly for themselves or no amount of justification on my part will redeem them.
AMK: “Planting a Sequoia” is a similarly lyric poem to “Prayer,” but the line breaks and the resulting shape of the poem is completely different, “Prayer” being made up of short tercets (save for the last line) and “Planting a Sequoia” of quintets of varying length. What’s the guiding principle behind these line breaks?
DG: The only guiding principles for line breaks are music and meaning. Not all tunes fall into the same rhythm. I hate to write in the same form or meter too often. I like variety. It allows one to go after different moods, effects, ideas. I am puzzled that so many poets fall habitually into one form or rhythm and never experiment. I usually find a book dull if all the poems are written in the same shape and style. I prefer variety and surprise.
AMK: I love how you personify the earth in the line “a sign the earth has one more life to bear.” It creates this notion that the earth is, in fact, bearing a life when we plant something in it and, perhaps more importantly, that it does have a limit to what it can nourish. Is this poem an environmental poem in a way?
DG: I come from peasant stock. We look to the earth to feed us. The redwood described in that poem is a real tree planted in my parents’ orchard with a small working farm around it. All of my poems about nature reflect deeply held environmental concerns. This isn’t politics. It’s common sense. We depend on the earth to live. We need to keep it livable. Nowhere are these issues more urgent than in California, a great despoiled paradise.
AMK: Teach us a little bit about personification as an element of imagination. When is it well placed; when is it not?
DG: There are no set rules for such things. Personification works when we feel it work. A poet can do everything perfectly well, and the poem remains stillborn. Another writer does something odd and seemingly incorrect, and it succeeds. This is the mystery of art.
Read Thomas Hardy. He is often awkward and heavy-handed, and yet he so often breaks your heart. Sometimes the very imperfections endow his poems with a sincerity and spontaneity that adds to their power. So I guess the best advice is to be a genius. That seems to work.
DG: I love metaphors, but I like to use them sparingly. It’s also nice to have a few hiding just under the surface of the poem so that the reader feels them without exactly knowing why.
But, of course, sometimes it’s just fun to go hog wild. Just like changing the meter or stanza, changing the texture of the poem is a pleasure. I think a lot about creating the right texture for each poem.
Mastering poetic craft does not consist of learning a few techniques one uses habitually. Mastery comes from learning how (and when) to use all the ways in which language conveys meaning.
AMK: I think it’s easy to forget that this poem is an apostrophe, a poem addressed to a person who is absent or imaginary or to an object or abstract idea. Why compose this poem in this form?
DG: Why not compose a poem as an address? In daily speech we are almost always addressing someone. It is something both speakers and listeners understand intuitively, even if it puzzles some critics. I’ve been re-reading John Donne. Most of his poems address someone—God, a lover, a friend.
AMK: I really like that strange moment around which the poem revolves in the third stanza. It adds a ceremonial aspect of the planting of the sequoia and also reveals quite a bit about the people in the poem with few words. Is this an aspect of the economy of language or of a disinterest on your end to go any further into what the poem is largely about?
DG: Now you have found me out. I like to have turns in my poems—moments when the poem changes direction or tone. This is a fundamental element of my style. That is also how our minds work. No sooner do we focus on some idea, thing, or emotion, than a contradictory notion suddenly emerges.
DG: Dante, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and a book-dealer’s catalogue to order more books. I own at least ten thousand books, and that seems a bare minimum. I like having my favorite volumes within easy reach. Reading is one of life’s great pleasures.
DG: I am trying to complete my next volume of poems. I only need to finish three or four more poems before I sent it to Graywolf Press. The trouble is that some of these poems are ones I’ve been struggling with for years, in one case almost 15 years. This summer I sent off poems for the first time in 8 years. I refrained from publishing while I was the Chairman oaf the National Endowment of the Arts. I thought it best for the agency if I removed any possible conflict of interest. (Not that I had much time to write since I often worked 7 days a week with constant travel.) Now I