Dream of No One but Myself, David Bradford
Brick Books, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.
David Bradford [photo credit: Sarah Bodri] is a poet, editor, and organizer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). He is the author of several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and is a founding editor of House House Press. Dream of No One but Myself is his first book.
Dream of No One but Myself is very much constructed as a book-length project, writing around the live and loss of your father. What prompted you to tell the story of your father, and that loss, through the form of the book-length poem, or even poetry at all?
You know, I had a mind that, if I was going to come at this flashpoint in my family history, in my family’s historical debris field, I was gone really come at it, so as to only do it once. Because writing, iterating, editing, presenting this book has been to learn a few things all over again: you can just keep cycling back through the process of these kinds of family histories, revelations, realizations. They stick, but the body forgets their feeling a bit, can want them unlocked all again. So, if I was going to do this, show the depth of the mess, I was going to dig deep enough to feel that maybe the digging could never end and you had to just call it—the end, that is. The openness of a hybrid, braided together bunch of coordinated, iterative forms all somehow poetry gave me room to explore the levels and questions I felt I needed to shape that kind of book.
So, an element of that I wanted to shape at the book level was sparked and organized by the felt experience of the sick trick of the dead, abusive parent: the way there were things about him I could only safely wade through, accept, empathize with once he had passed. Things that leave me ready to let the dead him back into my life but not the live him, were that an option. Basically, the insights of this book required death, and their staying power depends on it.
With that in mind, I think this book nurtures a relationship with haunting—a coming to terms tensioned by the impossibility, for me, of coming to terms with him when there was still a person to come to terms with. And the terms of that tension haunt themselves: the attempts below, the attempts above, the attempts out over there, haunted by the attempts over here. The ectoplasm spilling over from one form—one rip and cut and suture—to the next, to get goofy about it. There’s an element of letting it all through, then channeling these literally unspeakable tensions in the spectrum of ways all of this history is encountered and re-encountered, going through those motions knowing where they can’t go, to see where they can and can’t go, to put a reader through those motions too. To take readers through a spectral, gestural record of channeling the wake and drift of this personal, historical accrual, this urge to do some magic on it.
The uncontainable nature of this kind of family histories that comes back around and around, has no final answer, maybe just an end to the questions—poetry gave me a lot of room to explore the impulses all that entailed for me.
What do you think the form of the poem allowed you to articulate that might not have been possible had you worked the same material through the form of a memoir, or even a novel?
The thing about poetry for me is mostly permission to encourage my thinking to give in to the forces that give the genre its heft—the attention and tension.
The family stuff in this book started as a hulking lyrical essay, but I didn’t like any of the options before me for taking that work into a nonfiction publishing space. It didn’t feel like nonfiction processes would get me as far as I wanted to get with using up this material, going all in with the mutual haunting, bidding that stuff goodbye. That initial lyrical essay form also felt too editorialized for this irresolvability I was trying pattern, move on from, document: the essay pulled all the emotional strings, it tried to get the words right (even as it said it didn’t believe in the right words), and as is, it was kind of unbearable. It took a while to put together, but it felt like the surface, or the first layer.
So, turning to poetry—first with the idea of the soft erasures, the grey-and-black versioning technique—got me to keep digging, keep layering and re-arranging, keep growing the verbal and non-verbal gestures that left the record of this material feeling just barely exhausted (I hope), and gave its tattered, lossy fabric its due.
I guess my idea or ideal of poetry gave me the space to contain and really go after the stakes of that effort in a way non-poetic forms didn’t feel like they would.
How important is sound on the page as you work? Do you feel there is anything lost at all in sound or cadence through working on the page? What is the difference?
I think about the fraughtness of the decision-making processes involved in holding this kind of family stuff, family debt, family mess together—how much I ask readers to go through that process with this book—and I think my intense attention to sound, and working that out on the page over the last couple of decades, helped prepare me for that. Sound is so important for me, but same as the fraughtness, you can at best lay out and hedge for possible readings, give the reader some tools to work with in sounding out these poems.
But no matter the tools—line breaks, half rhymes, white space on the line, the careful aeration of erasures, the propellent or halting use of sometimes jarring periods—something of what these pieces sound like to me, or sound like coming from me, is always lost on the page. The beauty in that is something is always gained, too: the way it sounds to the reader, the decisions they’ll make in hearing these pieces out.
I guess that’s one big difference: the reader’s in charge on the page. It makes me want to hear them read what they hear. Because I can’t really sound that out myself.
Was there anything that writing through grief revealed that you weren’t expecting? Are the poems in Dream of No One but Myself part of a longer, ongoing process?
I think the text-book nature of the abuse came for me a bit. Some of these things you take to thinking about them as just “difficult” or “not good.” But calling them abuse can take a minute, or at least it did for me and my mother, both individually and together.
One embarrassing thing about trauma, particularly amidst and in the aftermath of contexts where you’re just going through the motions of it, is it’s true form sort of hides from you, then reveals itself plainly. There were lots of those moments in the process of writing this book.
A maybe even fleshier thing that revealed itself, though: how little my mother and I understood—how little we could understand, given our orientation to him—how few words we had, and how little healthcare was truly available to my father in terms of what he was dealing with mentally. A key part of the process for this book was asking my mother to confirm certain details over and over again. Some of the ups and downs that were challenging him emerged more clearly in those talks. And the complete uselessness of the institutions at this disposal, same as at other times in his life, also emerged more clearly, if unsurprisingly.
In terms of a longer, ongoing process: I really, warmly, deeply hope the answer is no. I’ve done a lot of thinking and growing out of the thoughts I laid out in for this book, but in terms of writing, this feels like it’s it for me. The whole point was to get to where it was done for me, even if, in a greater context, it might never be done for me.
Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Dream of No One but Myself was completed? What have you been working on since?
For better or worse, I jumped right in to the next thing when I completed my penultimate draft of the book in spring 2018.
I had the idea to do something less personal, maybe lighter. But that very quickly turned into Bottom Rail on Top, poems about dominant Black and white histories of Blackness in the antebellum South set against the day-to-day of the personal present—my present—that mediates it.
It’s a two-hander, in a sense: it brings together two strands of poetic sequences, popping back and forth between the experience of learning about and arranging all of these big and small Black histories and places and their echoes and contrasts in comparison with my life, the way my body does and doesn’t carry, the way I do and don’t want it to carry, the legacy of that past. It’s a project first built on a lot of the conflation I saw at play in Black radical theory that’s had a major impact on my work: the way a straight line is often drawn from slave narratives to, say, the Harlem Renaissance and then to us now. And in a way, I believe in that line. But I also believe that so much of my life—even amidst the racism and mindfucks and creative rub of being this kind of body in this kind of modern world—looks a lot like mastry, to borrow Kerry James Marshall’s phrase. So many material itches, so many supply chains ending at my door, so many platforms, so much modern self-making, so much funding, so much stuff, etc. Or to put it another way a bit more couched in disparities among Black people in the present, I need to acknowledge what it means that I’ve been called upon to speak, sometimes on behalf of… And as Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten have articulated crucially but too occasionally, that call means I’ve already become estranged from some of conditions I’ve been called upon to articulate. The problems of that estrangement, alongside some of the important echoes I describe above, are things I wanted to explore and describe on the page. Among a lot of other things to do with some of the ways Black folx formulate Blackness for themselves outside of the monolithic.
So,
there’s a lot more I could say, but I worked on that a couple of years, then
worked on it some more with Diasporic theorist Michelle M. Wright, which was an
invaluable experience. And now I’m entering the editing stages with Cecily
Nicholson, thinking about a few things we might add to it. The book should be
out in fall of 2023.