“All Winter I Remained With the Dead,” “How Many Times Mayakovsky,” and “Black-capped Chickadees” by Dianna MacKinnon Henning appeared in Issue 19 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about these three poems.
For “How Many Times Mayakovsky,” I have been fascinated by the Russian poets for some time. I am interested in how repression by a government can create such force in the voice of a writer. In this poem, I needed to use restraint because the emotion behind it was so all-consuming. Perhaps the poem was also instruction to myself regarding my own emotions which sometimes feel overwhelming. I think poems instruct us and myths are hard to live by. One can see in the life of Mayakovsky that he was heading for his own destruction.
“Black-capped Chickadees” came about by watching the birds gather on our mock-orange bush. They seemed to show up when I was lightly watering as if they knew I’d sprinkle them. In researching chickadees, I read that they erase their memories after three months or so to make room for new memories. I was quite struck by the inventiveness of such erasure.
The hardest one to write was “All Winter I Remained With the Dead.” I wrote it in the dead of winter and the winters are so harsh and cold and long here in Lassen County, CA. The seasons inform the poem. It seemed a poem driven by intuition and perhaps illustrates that questions don’t always get an answer. I like to allow myself room to wander and wonder in a poem. There is no resolution here. It’s a meditation on aging. Winter is death.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
“All the Light You Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
If I could have a drink with a living author it would be with Tim O’Brien who wrote the most spectacular (what I call a dramatic monologue) at the back of his book “The Things They Carried” where he says, “And then it becomes 1990.”
That stunning last paragraph of his book takes my breath away, how he skims the surface of his own history as he touches down upon the ice. Perhaps all writers skim the surface of their lives, working to chisel through ice to get to a rich sediment.
But I’d also like to have a drink with Anna Akhmatova who has touched me with her courage in the face of horrendous adversity. I would like to whisper lines of her poems to strangers in the market place who would then remember them so that her poems could not be destroyed by those who consider poets enemies of the state.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on editing, re-shaping my manuscript “The Step Into House.” The next series I want to work on concerns the rooms we die in.
“Black-capped Chickadees” came about by watching the birds gather on our mock-orange bush. They seemed to show up when I was lightly watering as if they knew I’d sprinkle them. In researching chickadees, I read that they erase their memories after three months or so to make room for new memories. I was quite struck by the inventiveness of such erasure.
Our thanks to Dianna for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Dianna’s poems, “All Winter I Remained With the Dead,” “How Many Times Mayakovsky,” and “Black-capped Chickadees,” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/three-poems-by-dianna-mackinnon-henning.