Writer Darren C. Demaree on Poetry as “the Best Kind of Ornery”
Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-three poetry collections, most recently So Much More, (Small Harbor Publishing, November 2024). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system.
Aaron Templeton, a first year MFA student in fiction, received the opportunity to interview poet, author, and editor Darren C. Demaree. In this published interview, the conversation touched on a wide array of subjects, including Darren’s catalogue, his thoughts on artificial intelligence, and the importance of poetry. Darren has a nuanced but powerful view of writing that comes from years of devotion to a craft he will die for.
We published your poem "Emily as I Receive a Handwritten Letter Asking if Darren is My Dead Name" earlier this year. What did it mean to you to get published in the Pinch?
It was a joy to be in Pinch. I’ve admired the work included in Pinch for years, and it was a great experience to have an “Emily As” Poem published by you all.
What do you think it means to be Pinchy? Or for a piece to be Pinchy?
I think it means you don’t mind the friction of the living; that sequitur and non-sequitur, nonsense and a great hope can all be together, and the work included in Pinch requires those tensions.
Our world changes at such a rapid pace. Twenty years ago, no one thought about Artificial Intelligence, at least no more than the evil robots in Terminator and Matrix. Now that we are effectively living in the age of Artificial Intelligence, what does it mean for you to be a writer in it?
When I found out A.I. had been trained using some of my work without my permission, I got pretty worked up, and I’m still hesitant to embrace A.I. in any of my work (poetry and libraries). To the specific question you asked though, I think the pace of the world can be an entry point or an exit point. You can join the torrent or say no thank you. Most artists tend to play jump rope with that concept. I’ve got no idea what the future will look like for my children, but the decisions they make will be similar to the ones we have to make. The contexts will be different, but I imagine the decisions will be similar. What do I want to give myself to? What do I want no part of?
Generic sports question - Memphis Tigers, any thoughts? Specifically, do we have a chance? Do you like us? Give us your honest opinion.
Depends on the sport. Basketball, maybe.
Generic travel question - Memphis. Have you ever been? And if so, what did you like about it? We can guess the Barbecue, Elvis, and Blues.
I have. One of my favorite bands, Lucero, is from Memphis. I love visiting. The food and music are incredible.
In your bio, it's mentioned that you received a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant. It is indicative of certain writers like McCarthy and even the age old painters and composers who received patronage toward their arts, especially when not many people were eager to support them. Did being a recipient of that grant make you feel more connected to some of the great artists who have come before, especially those you admire in any medium?
Not really. It’s nice when a grant or an award happens, but it’s never expected and I have no idea what it actually means. It doesn’t make me a better poet to win something or be acknowledged in that way. It has tangible value in terms of the money and what it allows you to do with your time, which hopefully means you’re getting a chance to experiment more or be more generative. I’ve been writing poetry for a long time, and I’ll write it until I die. It’s the routine and process that matters. It’s being a lifer, giving your life as much poetry as possible, that I think about that a lot. It’s why I don’t mind a project that fails. I still got to spend all that time with poetry, trying something, playing with the music and energy of words, and that’s the bit I love.
You have written twenty-three poetry collections, which is impressive enough to say, more to think on. Have you been writing poetry all your life? Is it something you started later and if so, did you have a mindset going in that you would write in this medium exclusively?
I’ve been writing poetry since I was ten, publishing it since I was twenty, and hopefully I’ve got another fifty years with it. The mindset is to stay curious and be challenged. Poetry does that for me in a way no other genre ever has.
Getting past the fact that a writer is a writer, you're also human and us people love our music and films. I had the feeling as I was reading this work that you were capturing aspects of Imposter Syndrome, particularly in how writers struggle to come into their own in light of being in established canons. I think your poem really hammers that with mentioning your other works connected to Emily Dickinson and that "[you're] slowly removing Darren from this world." Did you find anything like that when you were writing this poem or in other works you have penned?
I’m fascinated by Emily. She’s real. We’ve been married almost twenty years. The assumption that the larger project of the Emily as poems have something to do with Emily Dickinson or some other focus has always struck me as an interesting reading of the work. My own fascination, as we near 900 of them published, is in what the self and the ego has to do with using someone else’s name to live longer. You die, your work lives on (hopefully), and what does it mean to lift another name above my own? For me it’s love and the abandonment of the traditional goal of winning or succeeding. My therapist always wants me to say more about this idea I have of these poems, but it feels like if I answered the full question of why(?) then the poems would lose their searching. I want to be playful with Emily in the place I’m most myself, and that’s in these poems.
On a similar vein, your last verse says "This one erases me & I don't mind that so much." Are you speaking to your own authorship blending in with the style and rhythm, everything that makes an Emily Dickinson poem an Emily Dickinson poem, because you are so inspired by her? Or are you speaking to the fact that books are made from books, that every idea has come from another and so on?
I think it’s much more the idea that art is a confluence of other, of self, of purpose, and (yes) of other art and that all creates tethers. What if we cut those tethers and let it fly? What then?
The least explicit and least iceberg level deep question, when did you know you wanted to be a writer? Because writing is difficult, it requires a lot. It should be a simple, go go go kind of thing, but ask anyone and you would get a million thoughts on why you write before you hear an answer. So, tell us, when did you know it and furthermore, why?
I knew when I was ten, and I got in trouble for writing a poem that I would never want to stop. Poetry is the best kind of ornery.
