[JS] Much of your work revels in a formal attentiveness and precision, seen particularly in your use of dashes, slashes, brackets, and italics. With Dominion + Selected Poems, I think you’ve earned a classic Rocky-Balboa fist pump, so would you mind taking a moment to reflect on how your approach to poetic forms has evolved over time and what you consider to be perhaps the defining characteristic of a Dennis Hinrichsen poem?

DH: This is a great question to start with—the organization of Dominion is connected in that the selected poems begin with work from my third book with selections from my first and second book sequestered in typewriter font as an appendix with an accompanying lo-fi cassette recording. I didn’t intend to include any poems from the first two books in the early cuts of the manuscript—these poems were from the smoke-and-mirror phase where I blindly metabolized ideas from that amazing group of writers—Phil Levine, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Charles Wright, Adrienne Rich, Richard Hugo, W.S. Merwin et al—who were writing their seminal books. It was amazing to write during that time—with They Feed They Lion as model—or Body Rags—The Book of Nightmares—not to mention all the work in translation that was being done. And so I wrote and after a while had two books in hand—but I knew nothing. Knew I knew nothing—but also knew I was never not a formalist—it was frustrating.

The solution that eventually found its way into era-status was New Formalism—which was the rage for a few years. It made no sense to me—I had no interest in meter and rhyme—I knew there were other ideas out about shaping poetic language. And then I ran into Robert Hass’ essay “Listening and Making” in his Twentieth Century Pleasures. This essay opened the door for me in that it used a very basic idea about sound to analyze a formal poem by W.B. Yeats poem and then a free verse poem by Gary Snyder. I was blown away. There was a formal pattern that connected both and clarified that dance a poem makes between balance and tension.

That set me off on decades-long journey to flesh it. But things connected here and there. An essay on ghost form by Stephen Dobyns—something Charles Wright said about making sure the syllable count in his lines was always an odd number. It took a while but eventually I had a real clear sense of what I was doing with line, stanza, enjambment, ghost form, balance and tension, the poem as graphic design, etc. The poems in my third book, Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, reflected that. I knew what I was doing and so I wanted to start Dominion there.

This sustained me for a good long time, but around the time of my seventh or eighth book I grew restless. I felt I was performing the act of the being a poet rather than being one. Of staying within the acceptable bandwidths however amorphous they were. Of faking that Frost idea of surprise. The poem felt small to me. I wanted more of the world in my work. I wanted to sound and think differently. To break those stylistic habits I’d built over the previous books. And so I made the move to abandon punctuation. Merwin’s The Moving Target was root note here. I loved the flow of those poems and wanted to embrace that, but never really managed it. Charles Wright’s China Trace also figured in here (1977). The idea that you could begin with formal restrictions was new to me at that time. Every poem in that book is under 10 lines. His work with Zone Journals and Sestets continued to provide a model for moving from book to book and constantly evolving.

So I gave up on standard punctuation and embraced the dash initially and cinema and music as formal anchors. This eventually lead to double slashes and the chapbook [q / lear] where I stitched pieces of language together in a film / play / poem hybrid with Sally Mann-inspired body farm poems as backbeats.

But the poem was still small to me. It wasn’t until I was selected as Poet Laureate of the three-county area around Lansing and realized that I needed a digital self or foot print that the poems really opened up. My smartphone played a central role here. It was portal to the world and, as I say in one poem in schema geometrica, “anus" as well, as I was soon besieged with content of all kinds. I was connected to everything. I was, tongue-in-cheek, a kind of international poet living in a developed nation and complicit with harm everywhere via my lifestyle, via the things I owned, via white male privilege, etc. That thinking set the stage for the poems in schema. The key of that book was “contagion,” with a number of sub-ideas that I was alert to as I scrolled the news feed each day.

Formally, I wanted to use the broken sonnet as the loose restriction and channel both Shakespeare and James Brown to shape the dynamics, the crash ethos of the book.  I wanted one page poems with all the world I could pack into them as well as a full range of tones and emotions. I wanted to be pissed off, depressed, in mad love, sarcastic, ecstatic, funny, sentimental etc throughout the book or all at once. And so I just woke each day and scanned the newsfeed and crashed the macro with the micro and gave myself 14 or so lines to figure it out. The first one flew out of me so fast I knew I could sustain it and was off and writing—all of it drafted and revised on my smartphone to help contain it within that box of light I wanted on the page. This was the end of 2019. In early March 2020 I was getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the Jacksonville Zoo hand feeding flamingos, elephants, giraffes—all while the pandemic and discussion of the wet markets of Wuhan were just starting up. I left Florida the day before it closed and hunkered down for the next two years. It seemed serendipitous. Music theory played a role in this as well. I was always looking for the I, IV and V chords to shape the poem. Many of the titles reflect this. That was the geometric scheme at work.

I continued along these lines for the next book but going back to dashes—I wanted the poems to have more speed. Right now I’m completing a book where I’m using interior spacing and double colons to try to compress the line and stanza and alter the logos of the poems without losing a sense of scene and emotion.

That nervous formal energy might be the defining characteristic of my work. I love how form is siren—it calls to content—that’s where the surprise is more and more.

[JS]: Topically, you draw from an enviably deep well, by which I mean you knack for bricolage—your stitching together registers and domains as diverse as the hagiography of poetic traditions, pop cultural namedrops, religious/ritual symbolism, and niche obscurities, to name just a few. Would you mind speaking to your inspirations and the web of associations you weave? What planning, processes, or improvisations might you take into account?

DH: I’m not sure where it came from, but it has its roots in calculus and geometry—I was a math major before I switched to English and creative writing and explained once in another interview that I felt all things connected and I just moved among them via Euclidian congruities and a crash ethos. With a copy of Ovid in my back pocket. A second source was my work in outside academia. After I completed my MFA I worked for 10 years as a technical writer in Boston, the last five for an engineering firm whose main focus was designing and building nuclear power plants. This was post-Three Mile Island and pre-Chernobyl. The industry had come to a dead halt and the firm was desperate to do what they could to re-install faith in nuclear energy. So they took me and two other liberal arts majors and sat us in a room and said “save us.”

It was doomed from the start but in the end I got a feel for looking at a object or idea completely—from uranium mining and enrichment to design and construction in the case of nuclear power, to operation, to environmental/human impacts, to decommissioning and waste management, etc. So when I pick up my smartphone I wonder if there’s a blood mineral in it, I wonder what happened to the ones I’ve thrown away, I wonder how much electricity is keeping my digital self alive,  I wonder how much nuclear waste I’ve made using the wi-fi now and then in an exclusion zone. And so on.

And then a lot of film and music references since those disciplines are more root notes to me than poetry is. That all came together in schema where I just crashed things and asked “what the fuck?” Whitman’s “I sing the body electric” was mantra all through this. I was just trying to do it literally as figuratively. Eros was there. How quickly it shifts to the pornographic. I’ve never felt such surprise or joy as I did writing those poems. The pandemic helped. It compressed it all.

[JS] A ludicrously big question but one I’d be keen to hear your answer to: what’s your philosophy of language?

DH: Yeah, a big question but a good one—I’ve probably thought about in slant ways over the years—but never coalesced anything. And it’s so locked to the idea of the writing poetry that it comes off as more organic than anything else. But there are many mantras down in the aesthetic source code that are probably burned in how I observe my experience in this body in the world and find language for it. Music is source code so Pound’s “listen to the sound it makes” was one of the first ideas burned in. Marvin Bell’s “abandon yourself to the materials at hand” has been there since the beginning. Later, his idea that a poem is tautological, that is, it defines its terms and then exhausts them filtered in. The idea that the poem is a membrane of sound and sense that hangs between the writer and reader guided me for many years and touches on central concepts of transference (I need to make the reader feel something rather than having an emotion in front of them (hey, I’ve been to far too many open mics down in the trenches here) and transformation. The idea that just because I have an idea or an emotion doesn’t mean that I have the right to anyone’s attention until I transform language in a way that captures and keeps their attention line by line.

Very early on I realized that graphic design—the look of the poem on the page—the map of consciousness there—mattered. I am more drawn to poems that use line and stanza, indentation, that use the whole page, etc., than a run of left-justified lines. Early on in this process I read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift which guided my sense of the exchange between wherever the poems come from and myself, as well as between me and reader where the selling of a book is a difficult thing to do. I missed all the marketing/branding/etc seminars and give away a lot of my books to diffuse how I feel about the passing of money. I should add something Charles Wright said, or may have said because his work carried me for years: “be unappeased.” That’s a pretty good one to get you through those long walks in the desert that happen when you work at this discipline for decades.

[JS] And, if you don’t mind indulging a follow-up: given that philosophy (or, if you want, feel free to contradict or go off on an entirely new tangent), what real-world object/analogy/metaphor would you consider best fits your poetry?

DH: For the longest time, and again lately, Keith Jarrett’s solo piano work has been a constant soundtrack and model for how to improvise in the moment. I love listening to him think as he plays. The krautrock band Can plays a role here. The experimentation they embrace without ever losing, in the best songs, the groove. Five new live concerts have been released and have been in rotation for the last few months. We are not one mind when we write—there’s a call and response in there that comes from a deeper well—so listening to a four-piece band just start playing and think their way forward for 10 minutes or so is a delight. Given that we’ll be loving radioactivity again soon—Google has ordered seven nukes to feed its AI—Bill Gates is building one in Wyoming—near where you and I live the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in South Haven, Michigan is being refurbished for $8+ billion—my new totem object is the enriched uranium pellet. Back to I sing the body electric I guess. And still no place to put the waste. Very interesting times ahead with the pressure massive data centers are putting on the system. AI gotta eat.

[JS] You, like me, are born-and-raised Midwesterners, especially with Michigan, where you reside and I grew up. Is there anything about a Midwest sensibility that seeps into your work? How would you characterize that if so? Is there anything that you connect with when you hear the phrase “regional poetry” or do you eschew such labels?

DH: I’m midwest through and through—born in Iowa—a few years in Illinois and Indiana—and now many decades Michigan—I guess I qualify. And maybe I was just a regional poet when I started out—all my heroes were more or less regional—Levine and Detroit—James Wright and Ohio—Kinnell and New England—Hugo and Montana—but they were so well known nationally that they transcended the idea of just being regional poets. And now with all this technology at my disposal, I feel more and more the world is my playground. I’m connected to it all. My closet is a map of econo-colonization. There’s material from Africa in my phone, in the computer I’m writing with right now. Sad workers in China. Children picking coffee beans. Nano-plastic everywhere.  And on and on. Perhaps the midwest ethos that slips in is that while I read widely and seek out wildly different aesthetics, I never want to become unmoored from scene and emotion. The world’s on fire and I don’t want to foreground a strategy or logos that minimizes that. I want to name the shit, the ideas, that are harming us. Those secular eucharists.

[JS] It seems to me at least that releasing a selected poems edition of one’s work is also a comment on the press that releases it. You’ve worked with the fantastic Green Linden Press and editor Christopher Nelson for a number of your books, including Dominion + Selected Poems. What would you like to share about your working relationship with Green Linden and Nelson?

DH: “Fantastic Green Linden Press indeed”—I’m wildly biased at this point but I feel like I’m the luckiest poet on the planet and wish every writer could have a similar experience. So much to praise—maybe the simplest way to say it is that he designs exquisitely made books that serve the poems and invites the writer in as a collaborative partner. It was this way from the beginning with [q / lear] which was selected via the open reading period for chapbooks and continued even more collaboratively with schema geometrica which won the Wishing Jewel contest. That book I’m very proud of for a bunch of reasons and love how it turned out. When Christopher asked if I was interested in doing a new and selected, I was stunned—gobsmacked—I’d never really considered it—but, of course, said yes and we ended up doing Flesh-plastique which I had completed and then Dominion in 2024. I’m so grateful and can’t really describe the feeling of having Christopher and Green Linden supporting the work. And then he’s such a fine poet as well—check out Blood Aria or his two recent chapbooks—Fugitive and Windshear. His formal experimentation inspires my own sense of play as does his wonderfully compressed feel for line and stanza. It can’t get any better. There is an energetic backbeat that propels that wasn’t there before. Very grateful for it.

[JS]: What’s your take on the state(s) of poetry right now? In particular, what do you find exciting about it?

DH: The state of poetry—wow!—it’s been such living breathing evolving entity for me over the 45+years I’ve be writing that it’s hard to pin it down long enough to describe. And my window to it all has been from the frontier of teaching at a community college and spending most of my time down in the local poetry scene which is huge in Lansing, Michigan where I live and in other communities as I read throughout the state. So the state of poetry for is a hundred thousand wavelengths singing all at once—from the best to the worst—the ultimate open mic—poetry embraces it all.

It’s been interesting to cycle through all the eras, or what seemed like eras—that free verse explosion and translation that marked my entry, to the age of New Formalism that worked as a corrective the excesses of free verse, to the age of Bob Hicok and Dean Young maybe, to an age governed by Ashbery and CD Wright it seemed where you hid in the shadows if you favored narrative cohesion and used the pronoun “I” to an era now that embraces marginalized voices and feels so much more open and freer than ever before —all things seem possible now. I’m curious to see what the next pivot will be, or even if there will be one. Down in the local scene I’ve been freelancing with slam and performance poets the last few years and marveling at the skill sets there and talking Button/Write Bloody poets with them. I’ve been curious to see what pressure, if any, this brings to page poets as their world expands. It’s been an interesting gap to live in given the biases of age, race, culture, training, reading and aesthetics I have to negotiate to play a role. The good news is that there is common ground to be defined, at least down here in my world. 2025 is setting up to be a year of working toward this.

—

Dominion + Selected Poems is available now from Green Linden Press.