Writing Our Flaws, Our Failures, and Our Glorious Shine

In his newest book, Death Prefers the Minor Keys, a series of brief prose meditations, many first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty explores illness, survival, and the moments of grace and beauty to be found in a broken world. He is interviewed here by Dinty W. Moore on the line between prose poem and flash essay and how “the simple act of opening a pill vial … anything that deals with the lived life and labor can and should be subject matter” for our art.
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DINTY: You work third shift, caring for folks with traumatic brain injuries. This is an experience few poets, or writers of any sort, have in their lives, and clearly it informs what you write about. But does this experience also change how you write? Is your process or viewpoint different because of your day-to-day reality?

SEAN: I think my job has changed my relationship and experience of language and memory. I engage with folks whose sense of the present tense/and/or the past is ephermeral/transistory/in flux and so I am negotiating all kinds of false (not really the right word) narratives, or maybe a better word is dislocated from the present. It makes me think of how often I too am not present, how our minds are often in many … times, at the same time.

Also many folks I take care of have trouble speaking so I’ve learned to hear and make sense of streams of fragments. This can be a quite beautiful and staccato and rhythmical albeit frustrating relationship to language. So my use of fragments, my sense of leap, my skepticism of genre, my ideas of subverting tense in prose, my concept of the potential of a sentence as cubist, things I learned from literature over decades, have been reinforced and complicated by this work.

But more than anything the idea of language and personhood has deepened from this work. The sentence or a piece of a sentence is a link between a person and an act. But not necessarily forward. Sometimes a sentence reaches backwards across time and place. Sometimes we are both here and elsewhere, and to do that is to be imperfectly human. We are never one story to be told, but as Whitman said, we are multiple, and often and (always?) at the same time/times.

DINTY: That is truly fascinating. You refer here to sentences, but you are primarily a poet. The brief works in Death Prefers the Minor Keys read like flash essays to me, and we have in fact published one of them in Brevity recently. The attempt to delineate a precise line between prose poem and flash essay has been ongoing for years. Do you have a take on that, or does it in fact not really matter in the end?

SEAN: I know that debate has been going on for so long, and yet, as you know, and we’ve talked about that, I don’t consider a great amount of what I write to be poetry, though I’ve published so much prose as “poetry.” But I think much of what I do, and this book in particular, as something not quite poetry, not quite essay, at times maybe philosophy? Fable? And all together a kind of memoir. I met Lydia Davis decades ago and she said something so important to me. When asked if what she read was “real” or “fiction,” she said she doesn’t bother with those categories. For her it is all “story.” I began back then to wonder if most of what I do in prose I call poetry just so I don’t have to bother with categories. And if I get to page two or three it becomes an essay! More important to me than genre issues is a relationship to the sentence itself and what it does. And here I always return to the ideas of Louise Rosenblatt, one of the most underrated language theorists of the 20^th century. Her definition of language as a continuum between efferent or poetic has been so important for how I think and read and particularly how I revise.

DINTY: One of my favorite passages in your book comes at the beginning, in “The Shape of the Pill,” when you write “What is there if not this labor, the light labor of hands popping pills out of packages, checking names, prescription tags, double checking the correct dosage. Outside is only the dark and the near empty parking lot, the small labor of looking to make sure a sleeping man is breathing. So many shapes and colors of different pills that pass through my gloved hands.” I love how those sentences so perfectly capture how alone it feels to be working in the night, and I love your precision. But these three sentences also describe, I think your book. You are capturing the “many shapes and colors” of the moments that pass through your gloved hands. Your work exquisitely, and intimately, reminds us that anything can be subject matter for our art, if we take the time to truly see and feel what is there. Does that sound right?

SEAN: Yes Dinty, that is right on. One of the things in Death Prefers the Minor Keys was to, of course, be able to write and tell stories of people who often do not appear in “literature.” And to make sentences out of the smallness of these labors that extend far off into millions for whom life is hard and the body is full of betrayals. To make art out of the simple act of opening a pill vial, as perhaps you are right now, as you too recover from surgery. Subject matter for me comes out of the lived life, so anything that deals with the lived life and labor can and should be subject matter. It’s what we do with it in language that makes it art, or something not quite art, or something light-lit and more than art. And that is something that I was really trying to get at in this book of prose that fuses stories real and imagined, that fuses history and theosophy and the dailyness of life: to make something both more than art, but also at times something unapologetically not poetry: the way at times an essay can be mundane (efferent) but needs that language as part of the bones and blood of a poetic whole. And in the space between those things perhaps, I can only hope, the book will sing what it is to be a human being with all our flaws and failures and glorious shine. And to see and shine for those of us for whom the violence of our culture too often sees as less than.
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Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of 13 books including  The Second O of Sorrow (Boa Editions, 2018). His awards include a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans, two PA Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry and an appearance in Best American Poetry 2014. He lives in Erie, PA, works as a Med Tech, tours, hustles, and writes about stuff that happens in his city between the lake and the highway, and elsewhere in our wrecked and gloriously ruined and beautiful American lives.

Dinty W. Moore, founder of Brevity and current editor-in-chief, grew up in Erie, PA, just a ten-minute bike ride from the lake and docks and piles of ore.